"Sadly this is still hard to arrange. My little sister recently got the Sims 2, and I discovered that it had told her to make her account an Administrator account so she could play.
I changed it back to a limited account and added a 'runas' shortcut for the Sims 2... but with that general attitude, it's a losing battle.
That is complete laziness on the part of the developers, pure and simple. I've seen goddam business apps that demand to be run as admin for fucks sake. You are right, with attitudes like that out there in the closed source shops, there is little hope of things changing for the better.
" Virus writers should be dragged out in the street and... well, whatever."
Agreed.
"The only reason we need security for this crap is because the viruses exist.
The same can be said about door locks and burglars. Unfortunately, bad peeople are out there and the only thing that good people can do is try to protect themselves as best they can.
It doesn't help when the company making your door locks for you can't make a lock that isn't easily picked though.
"The guy needs to do some other tests - if he brings up a window and types, do the characters appear to be delayed too?"
Reminds me of a guy who bought his dot-matrix printer in for repair twice because it would not print the letter K. No amount of testing was enough to convince him that this was simply not possible. It turned out his keyboard had a faulty K key, and the K was not appearing on his screen either.
"The point is that with 90% of television, watching does nothing to improve you or the world."
This is true, however the same can be said for just about every other form of passive entertainment out there.
Myself, I have the TV turned on all evening when I'm at home, but I spend very little time sitting on the couch and actually watching it. Most of the time I just have it on while I'm doing other stuff. My house would be like a mausoleum otherwise.
"Seriously, go back about 7 years in computer hardware, and there is just about nothing useable in old computer parts."
As I said in another post, I have a 10 year old computer running a firewall perfectly happy right now, and I don't expect to have to replace it in the foreseable future, unless it fails, at which point there are plenty of other similar spec machines laying around that I can scavenge for parts.
I've been playing with PC's since before IBM came out with their first version, and one thing I have noticed is that in the last few years, the usefull lifespan of PC's is actually growing. I remember back in the eighties and early nineties when the migration from 8086/8088 to 80286 was a quantam leap in performance. Likewise the step up to the 386 and then the 486. Each iteration was a major step forward. When the Pentium came along @ 66Mhz and 100Mhz, we already had a 100Mhz 486, and there was not a huge reason to move along. It took about a year for the Pentiums to become relatively attractive, and today it is quite possible to use old computers for far longer than you used to be able to if you just want to do office apps and the like. Even longer if you relegate them to low utilisation server duties. I myself am writing this on a 5 year old 700Mhz P3 laptop, which is still perfectly serviceable, while the current state of the art is 3Ghz, more than four times faster in the "Megahurtz Stakes".
And it is only gonna get better in this regard, because in recent years it is primarily the release of a new Microsoft OS that is the spur to drive the market forward. But it is still several years before we will see Longhorn, so with the majority of folks still nursing along their Windows XP machines with static system requirments, there is little other than the minority who buy the latest and greatest games to motivate people into upgrading their PC's.
Think about it, by the time Longhorn comes out in 2006/7, people will be still happily chugging along with PC's running XP that they could conceivably have purchased in 2001, making them 5 or six years old, which is coming close to your "7 years old" above. As I mentioned elsewhere, the primary reason I see today for people buying new computers for home use is because they are "broken", which usually means they are infested with browser hijackers and IE no longer works. Other than that, there is usually nothing wrong with their "broken" computer at all.
"Your card will run slower if the power supply cant give it enough juice"
Say what? Where I come from if a PSU can't supply enough juice your card will just lock up and/or your entire system will come crashing down in a heap.
Unless that's what you meant by "run slower" that is
" pffft, most things on cars don't wear that quickly.
Sure, cars aren't completly worn out after five years, there are plenty of 25 year old cars out there to attest to that. It all comes down to your expectations as a driver.
Firstly, I don't choose to work on my cars myself. I used to play around when I was a kid but as a middle aged man there is no way I want to be farting about servicing my car all the time. Frankly, I couldn't imagine anything worse to be doing on a saturday afternoon. I have a job precisely so that I can pay some other chump to do that sort of thing for me.
Secondly, I do not have any desire to drive a vehicle that is of an age where the occasional breakdown becomes inevitable. My current Subaru has not broken down once since I have owned it. I am now however, starting to wonder how much longer it will be before I do get stranded somewhere.
On the otherhand, I personally know guys who think it is perfectly acceptable to drive about in 15-20 year old cars with a huge toolbox in the back which they use routinely to perform side-of-the-road repairs, and that is fine for them. They wouldn't have it any other way.
As I said, it all comes down to your expectations as a driver.
But my original point stands. Cars are less efficient as they age due to wearing, even at five years old. Contrast that with a five year old PC with five year old software, and you will see that it works exactly as well as it did when it was brand new. No more, no less (the occasional O/S reload not withstanding). This is an indisputable fact. Cars do wear over time, the only thing that is debatable is the point at which they can be declared to be "worn out"
"My 25 year old truck can attest to that."
hehe, I see and hear about those "25 year old trucks" every day on the way to work. They are the ones being mentioned during the traffic reports as being 'broken down on highway X, one lane is currently closed.';-) I'm mostly joking here BTW. I am well aware that plenty of breakdowns are due to modern cars and plenty of old cars run without fault. Nothing that is built by human hands is perfect and some 25 year old trucks are still very reliable and I'm sure yours is one of them. Having said that I doubt very much that a car made in the last decade will be anywhere near as reliable at age 25 as cars made in the seventies are even today at age 35. There is a lot to be said for really old cars, that's for sure. In fact it almost seems to me that if you want to have a truly reliable car these days, you need to go for a QUALITY new car or a really old early seventies clunker. Anything in between can be potentially dodgy. The problem is that a nice new car, while horribly expensive, does drive so much nicer than something made 35 years ago.
" Here in Canada, cars sometimes rust before they wear out their engine. That's the consequence of having 4 REAL seasons."
Actually, that's the consequence of flinging salt everywhere in an effort to overcome the adverse effects of a particular season but I do get your point.;-)
"you can drop the vcore and run it without a CPU fan at all.
If you intend to try this, you should note that you still require a passive heatsink on your CPU. Failure to use a heatsink will most assuredly result in one burnt out geriatric CPU, followed by much cursing on your part.
"I haven't seen a solid state part of a PC die. I always use a UPS, dust the insides once a year, and never overclock."
In fact, I often underclock the firewalls I build. I've found that if you take something like a Pentium MMX 200 and underclock it to something like 1.5x50Mhz (75Mhz) you can drop the vcore and run it without a CPU fan at all. Stick a "silent" fan in your PSU and you can have a perfectly adequete Smoothwall box that is damn near silent. 75Mhz is more than adequete to serve up packets over your typical ADSL line. Even when you are maxing out your bandwidth, CPU usage barely ever makes it over 15% (assuming you are using PCI NICs, old ISA NICs are more CPU dependant, so CPU usage will be higher but even then it won't ever hit 100%)
"None of these things were "worn out" when I got rid of them. With the cars, they just became such a maintenance issue, a car payment with fewer repairs was actually cheaper than fixing the car every other week."
In my book, a car that has ongoing "maintenance issues" would be the very definition of "worn out"
Sure, I have only bought second hand cars (and rather old ones at that) up until now. My last car was bought new, and it turned 5 in July. I live 55K from where I work and drive a 300K trip every second weekend so the kilometres rack up pretty fast. I have 165,000K on the clock after five years. I intend to keep the car another year, maybe two and the reappraise my situation then so if I stick to that plan it will mean that I have had the car 6-7 years. I don't plan to have it for ten.
"Typically the motherboard fails first because manufacturers use cheap electrolytic capacitors that leak (because they don't expect anyone to be using the hardware after 5 years)"
hehe, my current firewall has a 10 year old motherboard + P100 in it right now and it's still going strong. It is true that PC components will still occasionally fail and that the failure rate probably accelerates with age, but my point was that an aged computer, assuming that it still works, will work just as well as it did when it was new. A old car on the other hand, drives rougher, uses more fuel and oil and generally does not perform as well as it did when new, even if it is regularly maintained (which again, is something that is not often required to keep a PC functional.
Re:Joe Sixpack is looking for "useful life"
on
Less Might Be More
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· Score: 3, Interesting
"She was very upset because the one that had just 'died' was only a few months old. The way she described the 'deadness' reminded me of whatever the Windows virus was that rebooted your PC right after you started up."
This is an excellent point. Of all the clueless users I have ever met who had told me about their plans to buy a new computer, the primary reason that most of them had for wanting to do so was because thier old one was "broken", where broken=infected with virus's, spyware and broken apps. It didn't seem to matter at all to them when I explained that the computer was not broken, but only the software was. To clueless users, there is little definition between hardware and software in their minds. To them it is all just part of a homogonous whole called "the computer"
Thay almost all ended up goiing out and buying a new one (and unless the person was a close friend or relative, I didn't go out of my way to dissuade them. I just gave them some good advice and promptly left them to their own devices)
"The auto industry made its money convincing consumers that they had to have a new car, never mind that it was mechanically almost identical to the last three they had. Computers actually do develop new technologies, more power, and new end-user features at a fairly brisk pace."
Yes, but cars literally wear out, where computers generally don't*. PC's just keep on working just as well as they did when new until they are usually replaced simply because they are just obsolete, even though they still work OK. I've had at least 15 PCs over the last 20 years, usually have 4 or so in service at any one time. Not one of them have I had to replace because it "wore out". I've replaced many worn out cars in that same period.
* Hard disks + fans do wear out, for exactly the same reasons that cars wear out, ie they have moving parts. The difference is that it is trivially easy to replace a worn out HD or fan inj a PC, whereas it is financially impractical to try and replace every single moving part in an old car, which is why people tend to buy new ones every five years or so. Wholesale replacement of old parts generally only happens when someone is restoring a classic car and value for money is not the overriding factor at play.
I think you might have something there, although you would have to wonder then whether all the "britney-nekkid.jpg" files out there aren't actually pictures of a gaping anus, eh? I probably shouldn't give those idiots any ideas I suppose.
"I've noticed a *drastic* deterioration of quality of content lately, having all those kazaa losers coming over would explain that."
What is it with the "stealthed" porn movies on Overnet? You go and download what you think is an ISO of something but when you try to open the RAR package it gives an error. Eventually you decide to start randomly changing the file extension and when you hit upon AVI, Bingo!, you have an entire 80 minute porn movie instead of what you thought you were d'loading?
Now, I can understand the attraction of hiding the true nature of a files contents so that the RIAA/MPAA's bots don't easily locate it, but what does anybody have to gain by sticking porn movies out there with fake names and nothing whatsoever to indicate what the actual contents are?
The best answer I can come up with is that underage kiddies are swapping porn using P2P and trying to hide it from their parents but there has got to be better ways of achieving that goal, surely?
Slashdot Mirror
"the show plans to journey all the way to the Big Bang and back again.
I wonder if they will pick up a coupla burgers while they're there?
"eventually app devs will stop using dynamically linked libraries and offer stand alone, install anywhere with any (kernel compatable) OS apps"
Oh god, how I am looking forward to this happening. It can't come soon enough IMHO
"Sadly this is still hard to arrange. My little sister recently got the Sims 2, and I discovered that it had told her to make her account an Administrator account so she could play.
I changed it back to a limited account and added a 'runas' shortcut for the Sims 2... but with that general attitude, it's a losing battle.
That is complete laziness on the part of the developers, pure and simple. I've seen goddam business apps that demand to be run as admin for fucks sake. You are right, with attitudes like that out there in the closed source shops, there is little hope of things changing for the better.
" Virus writers should be dragged out in the street and... well, whatever."
Agreed.
"The only reason we need security for this crap is because the viruses exist.
The same can be said about door locks and burglars. Unfortunately, bad peeople are out there and the only thing that good people can do is try to protect themselves as best they can.
It doesn't help when the company making your door locks for you can't make a lock that isn't easily picked though.
Indeed. It always seemed to be that the stupidest fuckwits were also the rudest and most abusive. I'm sure glad I don't deal with that crap anymore.
"The guy needs to do some other tests - if he brings up a window and types, do the characters appear to be delayed too?"
Reminds me of a guy who bought his dot-matrix printer in for repair twice because it would not print the letter K. No amount of testing was enough to convince him that this was simply not possible. It turned out his keyboard had a faulty K key, and the K was not appearing on his screen either.
"The point is that with 90% of television, watching does nothing to improve you or the world."
This is true, however the same can be said for just about every other form of passive entertainment out there.
Myself, I have the TV turned on all evening when I'm at home, but I spend very little time sitting on the couch and actually watching it. Most of the time I just have it on while I'm doing other stuff. My house would be like a mausoleum otherwise."Seriously, go back about 7 years in computer hardware, and there is just about nothing useable in old computer parts."
As I said in another post, I have a 10 year old computer running a firewall perfectly happy right now, and I don't expect to have to replace it in the foreseable future, unless it fails, at which point there are plenty of other similar spec machines laying around that I can scavenge for parts.I've been playing with PC's since before IBM came out with their first version, and one thing I have noticed is that in the last few years, the usefull lifespan of PC's is actually growing. I remember back in the eighties and early nineties when the migration from 8086/8088 to 80286 was a quantam leap in performance. Likewise the step up to the 386 and then the 486. Each iteration was a major step forward. When the Pentium came along @ 66Mhz and 100Mhz, we already had a 100Mhz 486, and there was not a huge reason to move along. It took about a year for the Pentiums to become relatively attractive, and today it is quite possible to use old computers for far longer than you used to be able to if you just want to do office apps and the like. Even longer if you relegate them to low utilisation server duties. I myself am writing this on a 5 year old 700Mhz P3 laptop, which is still perfectly serviceable, while the current state of the art is 3Ghz, more than four times faster in the "Megahurtz Stakes".
And it is only gonna get better in this regard, because in recent years it is primarily the release of a new Microsoft OS that is the spur to drive the market forward. But it is still several years before we will see Longhorn, so with the majority of folks still nursing along their Windows XP machines with static system requirments, there is little other than the minority who buy the latest and greatest games to motivate people into upgrading their PC's.
Think about it, by the time Longhorn comes out in 2006/7, people will be still happily chugging along with PC's running XP that they could conceivably have purchased in 2001, making them 5 or six years old, which is coming close to your "7 years old" above. As I mentioned elsewhere, the primary reason I see today for people buying new computers for home use is because they are "broken", which usually means they are infested with browser hijackers and IE no longer works. Other than that, there is usually nothing wrong with their "broken" computer at all.
"Your card will run slower if the power supply cant give it enough juice"
Say what? Where I come from if a PSU can't supply enough juice your card will just lock up and/or your entire system will come crashing down in a heap.
Unless that's what you meant by "run slower" that is
"IIRC Sony accidentaly did that. If you engaged the night vision you could see through clothing.
You also needed an IR pass filter to do that, but otherwise you are correct.
"However, I think they recalled all the cameras that were capable of this.
I don't think they recalled them, they just stopped making them like that.
"Sun's problem is that their hardware isn't that great. "
True, but their stuff sure does look sexy as compared to the conservative and utilitarian styling that is so beloved by IBM.
----
'Who cares what CPU it has, just check out the face panel!'
"Smallpox (thanks to vaccinations) no longer exists in the wild. I'm sure someone will be able to come up with an apt computing metaphor ..."
How about the Stoned virus perhaps? I doubt there are any PC's out there still infected by that one.
" pffft, most things on cars don't wear that quickly.
Sure, cars aren't completly worn out after five years, there are plenty of 25 year old cars out there to attest to that. It all comes down to your expectations as a driver.
Firstly, I don't choose to work on my cars myself. I used to play around when I was a kid but as a middle aged man there is no way I want to be farting about servicing my car all the time. Frankly, I couldn't imagine anything worse to be doing on a saturday afternoon. I have a job precisely so that I can pay some other chump to do that sort of thing for me.
Secondly, I do not have any desire to drive a vehicle that is of an age where the occasional breakdown becomes inevitable. My current Subaru has not broken down once since I have owned it. I am now however, starting to wonder how much longer it will be before I do get stranded somewhere.On the otherhand, I personally know guys who think it is perfectly acceptable to drive about in 15-20 year old cars with a huge toolbox in the back which they use routinely to perform side-of-the-road repairs, and that is fine for them. They wouldn't have it any other way.
As I said, it all comes down to your expectations as a driver.
But my original point stands. Cars are less efficient as they age due to wearing, even at five years old. Contrast that with a five year old PC with five year old software, and you will see that it works exactly as well as it did when it was brand new. No more, no less (the occasional O/S reload not withstanding). This is an indisputable fact. Cars do wear over time, the only thing that is debatable is the point at which they can be declared to be "worn out"
"My 25 year old truck can attest to that."
hehe, I see and hear about those "25 year old trucks" every day on the way to work. They are the ones being mentioned during the traffic reports as being 'broken down on highway X, one lane is currently closed.' ;-) I'm mostly joking here BTW. I am well aware that plenty of breakdowns are due to modern cars and plenty of old cars run without fault. Nothing that is built by human hands is perfect and some 25 year old trucks are still very reliable and I'm sure yours is one of them. Having said that I doubt very much that a car made in the last decade will be anywhere near as reliable at age 25 as cars made in the seventies are even today at age 35. There is a lot to be said for really old cars, that's for sure. In fact it almost seems to me that if you want to have a truly reliable car these days, you need to go for a QUALITY new car or a really old early seventies clunker. Anything in between can be potentially dodgy. The problem is that a nice new car, while horribly expensive, does drive so much nicer than something made 35 years ago.
" Here in Canada, cars sometimes rust before they wear out their engine. That's the consequence of having 4 REAL seasons."
Actually, that's the consequence of flinging salt everywhere in an effort to overcome the adverse effects of a particular season but I do get your point. ;-)
"you can drop the vcore and run it without a CPU fan at all.
If you intend to try this, you should note that you still require a passive heatsink on your CPU. Failure to use a heatsink will most assuredly result in one burnt out geriatric CPU, followed by much cursing on your part.
"I haven't seen a solid state part of a PC die. I always use a UPS, dust the insides once a year, and never overclock."
In fact, I often underclock the firewalls I build. I've found that if you take something like a Pentium MMX 200 and underclock it to something like 1.5x50Mhz (75Mhz) you can drop the vcore and run it without a CPU fan at all. Stick a "silent" fan in your PSU and you can have a perfectly adequete Smoothwall box that is damn near silent. 75Mhz is more than adequete to serve up packets over your typical ADSL line. Even when you are maxing out your bandwidth, CPU usage barely ever makes it over 15% (assuming you are using PCI NICs, old ISA NICs are more CPU dependant, so CPU usage will be higher but even then it won't ever hit 100%)
"None of these things were "worn out" when I got rid of them. With the cars, they just became such a maintenance issue, a car payment with fewer repairs was actually cheaper than fixing the car every other week."
In my book, a car that has ongoing "maintenance issues" would be the very definition of "worn out"
"you replace a car every five years? MY GOD MAN!"
Sure, I have only bought second hand cars (and rather old ones at that) up until now. My last car was bought new, and it turned 5 in July. I live 55K from where I work and drive a 300K trip every second weekend so the kilometres rack up pretty fast. I have 165,000K on the clock after five years. I intend to keep the car another year, maybe two and the reappraise my situation then so if I stick to that plan it will mean that I have had the car 6-7 years. I don't plan to have it for ten.
"Typically the motherboard fails first because manufacturers use cheap electrolytic capacitors that leak (because they don't expect anyone to be using the hardware after 5 years)"
hehe, my current firewall has a 10 year old motherboard + P100 in it right now and it's still going strong. It is true that PC components will still occasionally fail and that the failure rate probably accelerates with age, but my point was that an aged computer, assuming that it still works, will work just as well as it did when it was new. A old car on the other hand, drives rougher, uses more fuel and oil and generally does not perform as well as it did when new, even if it is regularly maintained (which again, is something that is not often required to keep a PC functional.
"She was very upset because the one that had just 'died' was only a few months old. The way she described the 'deadness' reminded me of whatever the Windows virus was that rebooted your PC right after you started up."
This is an excellent point. Of all the clueless users I have ever met who had told me about their plans to buy a new computer, the primary reason that most of them had for wanting to do so was because thier old one was "broken", where broken=infected with virus's, spyware and broken apps. It didn't seem to matter at all to them when I explained that the computer was not broken, but only the software was. To clueless users, there is little definition between hardware and software in their minds. To them it is all just part of a homogonous whole called "the computer"
Thay almost all ended up goiing out and buying a new one (and unless the person was a close friend or relative, I didn't go out of my way to dissuade them. I just gave them some good advice and promptly left them to their own devices)
"The auto industry made its money convincing consumers that they had to have a new car, never mind that it was mechanically almost identical to the last three they had. Computers actually do develop new technologies, more power, and new end-user features at a fairly brisk pace."
Yes, but cars literally wear out, where computers generally don't*. PC's just keep on working just as well as they did when new until they are usually replaced simply because they are just obsolete, even though they still work OK. I've had at least 15 PCs over the last 20 years, usually have 4 or so in service at any one time. Not one of them have I had to replace because it "wore out". I've replaced many worn out cars in that same period.
* Hard disks + fans do wear out, for exactly the same reasons that cars wear out, ie they have moving parts. The difference is that it is trivially easy to replace a worn out HD or fan inj a PC, whereas it is financially impractical to try and replace every single moving part in an old car, which is why people tend to buy new ones every five years or so. Wholesale replacement of old parts generally only happens when someone is restoring a classic car and value for money is not the overriding factor at play.
2.) They are assholes
I think you might have something there, although you would have to wonder then whether all the "britney-nekkid.jpg" files out there aren't actually pictures of a gaping anus, eh? I probably shouldn't give those idiots any ideas I suppose.
Yes, thanks very much, but I have already figured out what type of files these are on my own.
What I wanted to know is why these files are placed surreptitiously on P2P, not the name of a superfluous file identification utility.
"I've noticed a *drastic* deterioration of quality of content lately, having all those kazaa losers coming over would explain that."
What is it with the "stealthed" porn movies on Overnet? You go and download what you think is an ISO of something but when you try to open the RAR package it gives an error. Eventually you decide to start randomly changing the file extension and when you hit upon AVI, Bingo!, you have an entire 80 minute porn movie instead of what you thought you were d'loading?
Now, I can understand the attraction of hiding the true nature of a files contents so that the RIAA/MPAA's bots don't easily locate it, but what does anybody have to gain by sticking porn movies out there with fake names and nothing whatsoever to indicate what the actual contents are?
The best answer I can come up with is that underage kiddies are swapping porn using P2P and trying to hide it from their parents but there has got to be better ways of achieving that goal, surely?
" the real question is.. why are you looking for David Hasselhoff stuff on edonkey?"
Maybe he's looking for a copy of Starcrash, aka "The Spaghetti Star Wars"?