Those people are impossible. I've tried telling them everything I have runs Linux, I've told them I know Windows does not report viruses to Microsoft, once I even posed as a Microsoft employee and tried to get him to tell me where they are. All of that gets the current caller to hang up, but it doesn't stop the next idiot from calling. Obviously there's no communication between the various people who run this scam.
I don't really object to ads on a page as long as they are not obnoxious. My definition of obnoxious includes autostarting video ads that cannot be stopped, especially if the page contains more than one such video so that you get a blast of overlapping gabble that can't even be understood. There is also a truly evil small square box that plays a list of ads one after the other - and loads them constantly at a rate that causes the page to hang and jerk. (Remember the good old days of huge GIF animations that bogged down a page? Yeah, these are worse). And finally, I truly hate the trick of letting you read halfway through the first paragraph of a page, then turning the page dark and throwing an ad up. If you must do a popup, at least have the courtesy to DO it and let the user close it without blowing his whole train of thought.
And for the edification of advertisers, I usually at least glance at a passive ad. The obnoxious popup types I close instantly. So in my case at least, that technique is not effective at getting your message across. On the contrary, if I notice the product at all, I'm inclined NOT to buy it just because they deliberately annoyed me.
I'm getting into the same boat because of progressing MS. I bought a fairly inexpensive gaming mouse by Etekcity. It's a bit bigger than average without being a hand-stretching monster, and it has a 3-position DPI selector that lets me adjust to my ability at any given moment. If I'm shakier, I can slow down the mouse response. Plus it has a pair of programmable side buttons which I have set for volume up/down. All this is not for gaming in my case, it's to help me use the mouse with a fair degree of comfort. Sometimes a product made for one purpose can do wonders for a completely different problem.
I don't know, I think the singing three-headed chipmunks from the planet Doodah clash with the wicked stepmother who sounds like Donald Duck having a mad fit.
Yep. I had a huge box of them from the 90s and one day I decided to copy anything useful from them while I still had a computer with a floppy drive. Total waste of time - not a single one was readable. Oddly enough, more than half showed as not even being present at all. No disc in drive. That's a pretty bad failure!
I live in Arizona where we don't fuck with it, but it makes me rethink local times vs times in other states when I need to call someone. It was a stupid idea that never made sense from the beginning. Let's drop it.
Okay, I'm a geologist. It happens that I live in an intermontane basin filled with alluvium, and I know the water table is about 30 feet down at my location. If I were so inclined, I could take a couple of wires or a willow stick, walk around a bit for show, then "find" a place. I'd tell you to dig 30 feet and you'll find water - and I'd be right. The knowledge this takes is not that hard to acquire, especially if you want to work in a specific region. I suspect many of the "professional" water dowsers are simply doing that and making a buck from credulous buyers.
That said, I have seen people do some freaky things with dowsing rods. As a scientist I have to doubt any mystical source, but I admit having had a few WTF moments courtesy of one old fellow I used to know. He would find ore veins - where I knew they actually were, and he couldn't have because I hadn't shared my survey findings. But guess what? Ore veins do affect both the magnetic and gravitational fields. I don't completely discount an ability by some people to detect that - after all, some birds apparently do.
The universe is a sphere only 20 meters across. It looks bigger, but that's an illusion. It's done with mirrors. Large objects like the Earth fit in it because the universe is bigger inside than it is outside.
We still used them in 83 where I was. We had to code by hand on coding forms, then we had to make our own punch cards on IBM Model 29s. The target system, an IBM 360, had a tempermental card reader that would sometimes spew the cards all over the place. Gathering them up and resorting them was a real treat. But we did get to see if it compiled on the spot. Whether it gave the desired output, well that was another matter.
I spent a decade as a coal miner in my youth. I even earned a license as a blasting supervisor. And I can code. I don't code for a living, but yeah, I can code. I find the implication that coal miners are somehow too dumb to learn anything else mildly offensive. Many coal miners are the product of a family that has done the same work for generations, and just kind of inherited the job. Same with farmers. But that doesn't mean they are incapable of doing anything else.
Yes, I recently installed a new router and just let it make its own connection. Soon I had DNS problems, which reminded me that I had switched to Google DNS on the old router for that very reason. A quick fix solved the problem. My ISP is Cox, not Comcast, but they also seem to have a very flaky DNS service.
$50 per pint, and it's technical grade. I used to get a case of 4 5-liter jugs of top reagent grade for ~$90. But even so, it's illegal to possess it here.
Not just hobby chemists either. I'm a geologist with a minor in analytic chemistry. I used to have an assay lab where I could run samples for qualitative analysis. That's in the crapper now. You have to jump through hoops to get things like con nitric acid, and just forget anything like potassium cyanide. And if you do manage to get supplies, they make you a target for a raid any time the local cops get a bug up their ass. So no more lab.:(
I have Cox, and by far the loudest and most obnoxious commercials are THEIRS! They have this guy who screams everything, goes COX BUNDLE!! over and over, etc. It does annoy me, sometimes to the point of grabbing for the mute button.
I think you're exactly right. The Bush Administration used 9/11 to gain the level of power and control that allowed them to pass the Patriot Act and create the DHS with all its Draconian aspects, and now the Obama Administration is either unable or unwilling to change it. Do you want to fight terrorism? Well, you don't gain a damn thing by giving the terrorists what they want! Their name says it all - their goal is to put their enemies in FEAR of them. By running scared and giving up our freedom in the name of 'security', we have given them a major victory. It needs to stop. We the people need to MAKE it stop. Because where we are heading is ever deeper into the swamp, and in that swamp there lies nothing but mud and snakes.
Yes, and the idea that they "don't look at it" is not really true either. Every piece of collected data is sifted by computer algorithms that look for key words, etc. If any are found, a flag is set. That qualifies as "looking at it" IMO. Now, the system probably produces so many flags that they still can't actually read all of them. If I had that problem, I would sort the flagged data into arrays so I could look for patterns. If the same person gets flagged a set number of times, or the flags show something like keyword X and keyword Y, then his stuff gets read by a real person. The problem with that is that the message content would have to be kept so it could be examined if needed. Simply stated, I do not believe only metadata is kept. It would be useless if it couldn't be put into context when something odd is detected.
I recently retired from 23 years in US Government service. The federal agency policy forbids the use of open document formats, and nothing produced in OO or LO can be used. So I agree, MS Office would have to run. And not via some emulator that causes everything to slow to a crawl. As for games, I tend to install and uninstall crap constantly. Right now I'm playing Gnomoria and Plants vs Zombies, but neither will keep my attention very long. So I'd say the most important thing is to make installation easy - like point-and-click easy for those of us who don't really like troubleshooting failed dependencies. I can do that, but it isn't my idea of fun.
I should clarify that I use my *NIX boxes as network file servers, not workstations. FreeBSD offers me the best performance and easiest setup in a mixed environment, plus they run reliably unattended for months on end and have good security that is not a pain to manage.
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Those people are impossible. I've tried telling them everything I have runs Linux, I've told them I know Windows does not report viruses to Microsoft, once I even posed as a Microsoft employee and tried to get him to tell me where they are. All of that gets the current caller to hang up, but it doesn't stop the next idiot from calling. Obviously there's no communication between the various people who run this scam.
I don't really object to ads on a page as long as they are not obnoxious. My definition of obnoxious includes autostarting video ads that cannot be stopped, especially if the page contains more than one such video so that you get a blast of overlapping gabble that can't even be understood. There is also a truly evil small square box that plays a list of ads one after the other - and loads them constantly at a rate that causes the page to hang and jerk. (Remember the good old days of huge GIF animations that bogged down a page? Yeah, these are worse). And finally, I truly hate the trick of letting you read halfway through the first paragraph of a page, then turning the page dark and throwing an ad up. If you must do a popup, at least have the courtesy to DO it and let the user close it without blowing his whole train of thought. And for the edification of advertisers, I usually at least glance at a passive ad. The obnoxious popup types I close instantly. So in my case at least, that technique is not effective at getting your message across. On the contrary, if I notice the product at all, I'm inclined NOT to buy it just because they deliberately annoyed me.
I'm getting into the same boat because of progressing MS. I bought a fairly inexpensive gaming mouse by Etekcity. It's a bit bigger than average without being a hand-stretching monster, and it has a 3-position DPI selector that lets me adjust to my ability at any given moment. If I'm shakier, I can slow down the mouse response. Plus it has a pair of programmable side buttons which I have set for volume up/down. All this is not for gaming in my case, it's to help me use the mouse with a fair degree of comfort. Sometimes a product made for one purpose can do wonders for a completely different problem.
Settled? The cruise line/political survey outfit is still at it. I got their call just a few days ago.
Neither will I. My eyes have gone bad with advancing age, and I can no longer see any difference between current definitions. :(
I don't know, I think the singing three-headed chipmunks from the planet Doodah clash with the wicked stepmother who sounds like Donald Duck having a mad fit.
Yep. I had a huge box of them from the 90s and one day I decided to copy anything useful from them while I still had a computer with a floppy drive. Total waste of time - not a single one was readable. Oddly enough, more than half showed as not even being present at all. No disc in drive. That's a pretty bad failure!
Yeah... when I can buy a terabyte drive for a hundred bucks or so, it might be interesting.
I live in Arizona where we don't fuck with it, but it makes me rethink local times vs times in other states when I need to call someone. It was a stupid idea that never made sense from the beginning. Let's drop it.
Okay, I'm a geologist. It happens that I live in an intermontane basin filled with alluvium, and I know the water table is about 30 feet down at my location. If I were so inclined, I could take a couple of wires or a willow stick, walk around a bit for show, then "find" a place. I'd tell you to dig 30 feet and you'll find water - and I'd be right. The knowledge this takes is not that hard to acquire, especially if you want to work in a specific region. I suspect many of the "professional" water dowsers are simply doing that and making a buck from credulous buyers. That said, I have seen people do some freaky things with dowsing rods. As a scientist I have to doubt any mystical source, but I admit having had a few WTF moments courtesy of one old fellow I used to know. He would find ore veins - where I knew they actually were, and he couldn't have because I hadn't shared my survey findings. But guess what? Ore veins do affect both the magnetic and gravitational fields. I don't completely discount an ability by some people to detect that - after all, some birds apparently do.
The universe is a sphere only 20 meters across. It looks bigger, but that's an illusion. It's done with mirrors. Large objects like the Earth fit in it because the universe is bigger inside than it is outside.
Me too. Rachel is still a constant nuisance. Maybe it's a ghost...
We still used them in 83 where I was. We had to code by hand on coding forms, then we had to make our own punch cards on IBM Model 29s. The target system, an IBM 360, had a tempermental card reader that would sometimes spew the cards all over the place. Gathering them up and resorting them was a real treat. But we did get to see if it compiled on the spot. Whether it gave the desired output, well that was another matter.
I spent a decade as a coal miner in my youth. I even earned a license as a blasting supervisor. And I can code. I don't code for a living, but yeah, I can code. I find the implication that coal miners are somehow too dumb to learn anything else mildly offensive. Many coal miners are the product of a family that has done the same work for generations, and just kind of inherited the job. Same with farmers. But that doesn't mean they are incapable of doing anything else.
Yes, I recently installed a new router and just let it make its own connection. Soon I had DNS problems, which reminded me that I had switched to Google DNS on the old router for that very reason. A quick fix solved the problem. My ISP is Cox, not Comcast, but they also seem to have a very flaky DNS service.
$50 per pint, and it's technical grade. I used to get a case of 4 5-liter jugs of top reagent grade for ~$90. But even so, it's illegal to possess it here.
Not just hobby chemists either. I'm a geologist with a minor in analytic chemistry. I used to have an assay lab where I could run samples for qualitative analysis. That's in the crapper now. You have to jump through hoops to get things like con nitric acid, and just forget anything like potassium cyanide. And if you do manage to get supplies, they make you a target for a raid any time the local cops get a bug up their ass. So no more lab. :(
I have Cox, and by far the loudest and most obnoxious commercials are THEIRS! They have this guy who screams everything, goes COX BUNDLE!! over and over, etc. It does annoy me, sometimes to the point of grabbing for the mute button.
I think you're exactly right. The Bush Administration used 9/11 to gain the level of power and control that allowed them to pass the Patriot Act and create the DHS with all its Draconian aspects, and now the Obama Administration is either unable or unwilling to change it. Do you want to fight terrorism? Well, you don't gain a damn thing by giving the terrorists what they want! Their name says it all - their goal is to put their enemies in FEAR of them. By running scared and giving up our freedom in the name of 'security', we have given them a major victory. It needs to stop. We the people need to MAKE it stop. Because where we are heading is ever deeper into the swamp, and in that swamp there lies nothing but mud and snakes.
Yes, and the idea that they "don't look at it" is not really true either. Every piece of collected data is sifted by computer algorithms that look for key words, etc. If any are found, a flag is set. That qualifies as "looking at it" IMO. Now, the system probably produces so many flags that they still can't actually read all of them. If I had that problem, I would sort the flagged data into arrays so I could look for patterns. If the same person gets flagged a set number of times, or the flags show something like keyword X and keyword Y, then his stuff gets read by a real person. The problem with that is that the message content would have to be kept so it could be examined if needed. Simply stated, I do not believe only metadata is kept. It would be useless if it couldn't be put into context when something odd is detected.
Really. Outlook will make all the difference for sure. Just like a wax job will fix a car that doesn't run.
Movie studios should remove their garbage from everywhere, and we should stop paying them money that they use to shaft us with.
Absolutely. I buy nothing from these jerks.
I recently retired from 23 years in US Government service. The federal agency policy forbids the use of open document formats, and nothing produced in OO or LO can be used. So I agree, MS Office would have to run. And not via some emulator that causes everything to slow to a crawl. As for games, I tend to install and uninstall crap constantly. Right now I'm playing Gnomoria and Plants vs Zombies, but neither will keep my attention very long. So I'd say the most important thing is to make installation easy - like point-and-click easy for those of us who don't really like troubleshooting failed dependencies. I can do that, but it isn't my idea of fun.
I should clarify that I use my *NIX boxes as network file servers, not workstations. FreeBSD offers me the best performance and easiest setup in a mixed environment, plus they run reliably unattended for months on end and have good security that is not a pain to manage.