It was about a decade ago that I upgraded one of my lab machines to 640MB, because that "ought to be enough for anybody."
But these days it's way way way too small, mostly for browsers and caching. Lenovo's already lost one sale from me by selling a cute little Atom-based slab machine for $199 which only had 512MB in it (or maybe it was 1GB) because the packaging didn't say anything about whether it could be upgraded or not. Yes, I know they need to have a low-config price to get some people to buy it, but it costs less than $50 for 2GB of notebook RAM and even less for desktop RAM, and there's no excuse for making a machine that can't be upgraded.
Can't they put a starter motor in the thing? I'd hate to have to get out, kick-start the thing, and have it fly away; that'd be almost as bad as having an old crank-start car trying to run you over.
Back in 1999, the world was finally becoming a civilized place. The Soviet Union was gone, 40 years of nuclear terrorism were over, and we were in the trailing edge of a long technology boom even though most of us realized that selling dogfood online might not be an entirely sustainable business model:-)
The reason it took Ian Goldberg three hours to crack one of the main GSM algorithms back then is that the Chinese restaurant near campus was having the good lunch special that day - he estimates it would have been more like two hours otherwise. It was really incompetently done, some variant on a fast Fourier transform, and the "we developed it in Seekrit so nobody can crack it" approach meant that there was no adult supervision. Had they developed the standard in public, they'd have been advised to use an algorithm that provided some actual cryptographic protection.
The "malice" part is that the most common implementation sets 10 of the 64 key bits to zero. (And that, of course, depends on whether your carrier even bothers to do the encryption - back when that version of the crack was announced, my GSM-based cellphone would always tell me that encryption wasn't enabled when I made calls, and I'm not sure if the reason it doesn't do that now is that the carrier's behaving themselves or if they just dropped the error message.)
Really, crowdsourcing a problem like this shouldn't be hard - 21 cameras, lots of geeks, Google Earth? How long will they stay hidden? Let's have a contest to find the things!
My last major desktop upgrade (other than disk and RAM) was when the bright purple flash let the magic smoke out of my P266 machine - I replaced it with a 2.4GHz Celeron. I'm about to have to upgrade again, because I want a better display, now that you can get high-resolution LCD screens for under $200. The problem is that my current graphics card can only drive 1280x1024 VGA, so I'll need a new card, but most cards that can do more than 1400x900 use PCI-Express, not AGP. So if I want a new screen, I'll need a new motherboard. Alternatively, if I want a new internal disk drive, they're all SATA these days, so I'll also need either a new SATA card, or just a new motherboard. And of course if I'm getting a new motherboard, that'll need a new CPU:-)
The alternative is that there are some little $200 Atom-CPU boxes that have HDMI; the problem is that they typically come with 1GB RAM and don't say if you can upgrade that (and sorry, 1GB isn't enough for Firefox these days, much less fancy video stuff.) They also need external disk drives to add any significant storage, but that's tolerable.
Just in case you don't want to have to click on a couple of links to get there.
Once you know what it is, the FAQ makes sense, but like way too many FAQs, it starts out by assuming you already know what the thing is and doesn't explain that.
I do remember one time we had our three-levels-up director in on a Saturday when we had a rush project. It was an RFP, not a programming project, it was important to get done and had a short deadline to produce hundreds of pages of accurate interesting responses to inherently dull and boring material. We put him to work photocopying and fetching pizza, and he avoided micromanaging (something he didn't always avoid:-) He probably did add a bit of value to the executive summary part, but I wasn't working on that section. It was a couple of decades ago, and since I still remember it it was probably good for morale...
This was the real terrorism, politicians and generals trying to look tougher than the other side and threatening to blow up the entire world, poisoning us all and maybe causing a nuclear winter to kill off anybody that's left, and it went on for forty fucking years. Back when I was a kid, I had neighbors digging holes in their back yards for bomb shelters, and we'd get drills in elementary school about how to hide in the hallways during nuclear attacks.
Al Qaeda's just some bunch of second-rate lamers they're using as an excuse since there isn't a real Enemy any more. (Yeah, they're evil bastards, but the direct damage they've done is a lot less than the IRA did over a few decades, in spite of the US starting a couple of wars over them.)
While I'm disappointed with Obama in general, one thing he did that was really good was back down on the Bush Administration's radar systems in eastern Europe, which were there to provoke the Russians.
I visited one in Lithuania a few years ago that's open for tours. It's not in the same shiny condition as the US ones in Arizona - the Lithuanian name for their country means "rainy", and rust never sleeps. The lighting's bad, and you don't really trust the electricity not to zap you as you're walking around, and there's this big dark rust-lined hole that's where the missile was. Much of the facility looks like the kind of abandoned factory where you'd set the ending of a B-grade movie, but in worse condition.
And yeah, the folks there were just hanging out waiting to be told to launch a missile to kill a few million people, and knowing that they'd have to launch quickly because a US missile was targeted on them. And they probably didn't have the level of operational protections that the US missiles had.
This topic came up in the 90s, back when there was an ongoing Cypherpunks movement discussing how technology was changing society and how to deal with it. Other than of course using pseudonyms and unlinkable multiple identities, there was also the suggestion of having a service that was constantly publishing disinformation about you, so that any bad stuff that was actually true was lost in the noise of internet trolls claiming that your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries and obsessing about how full of eels your hovercraft might be.
Dude, I hope that wasn't an electric guitar - we couldn't think of hiring anyone for a technology job who did anything that dangerous!
If it's an acoustic guitar, then maybe okay if it's a cheap one and not a Martin. And it it was just a banjo, then meh, whatever, that's ok if you don't play it at the office.
The folks who run jails are done with Michael Vick; they seem to have decided that two years in the can is how much punishment you deserve for running dogfights and killing some of your dogs. That's not the NFL's problem - they're trying to Look Good to the public, and having an employee who (at least in the past) was the kind of vicious asshole who enjoys cruelty to animals probably makes them look worse than having somebody who got caught smoking dope. (And that's different from a player who got caught using steroids, which is cheating, or got caught gambling, which might lead to a player throwing a game to pay some debts.) On the other hand, if Vick puts in enough time doing public service with the Humane Society or whatever, maybe he'll get forgiven by most of the public, but it'll be a tough sell to get people do decide that he's changed.
If Anonymous Coward did something stupid when he was young, well, hopefully it wasn't *too* disreputable, and if you get past the HR department robofiltering when you're applying for a job and get to a real interview with somebody who's found out about it, you may have to admit having been stupid when you were young. Who knows, maybe they were also stupid when they were young:-)
Meanwhile, it helps to have a relatively common name, so the first half million Google hits are about somebody else, and to have enough positive reputation that the most common hits for your name with useful keywords get good references.
In case you've forgotten what a Larrabee was (like I had), it was Intel's planned graphics / vector processing chip, competing with nVidia and AMD / ATI graphics systems. Here's the Wikipedia article.
http://salon.com:-) I mainly read Doonesbury there, plus articles other sites refer to, because I also stopped going there routinely after the paywall hit, and haven't looked at the front page (except for just now...)
(I don't actually know if they carry here live or not. I mainly read Doonesbury there, plus articles where some other source points me to a link at salon.com.)
I don't know if the free receive-only email service I used to register still works reliably, so I won't mention their name, but I haven't had to update the nytimes registration in a few years. You do definitely have to register if you want to comment on articles.
You can always try bugmenot.com. Perhaps the Slashdot "login=anonymous password=coward" works there?
I've usually found that the cartridge that comes with the printer has about half as much ink as a new cartridge - so even if a new printer costs about the same as a new cartridge, it's usually better to get the cartridge. (Not always - sometimes a store will be selling the Model N-1 printer a lot cheaper, and sometimes it's helpful to have a spare printer in case the other one breaks, but it's seldom helpful to have more than one spare.)
Internet services are "enhanced" services, not common-carrier voice. And if you read the blurbs at the beginning of your phone book, you'll see that they've got an AUP that says you're not allowed to use your land-line phone for obscene or harassing phone calls either. (Or the Phone Police will go rip your phone out of the wall.)
While it looks like too many lawyers and non-lawyers were copying other services' AUPs, it looks like what they're really trying to do is give themselves leverage to drop you if you engage in activities that get them hit with too many complaints. That's not the same as saying that they'll go trying to police your postings (yeah, like that would make financial sense), but they want to be able to kill spammers, blog-comment-spammers, and anybody else that causes them trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
It was about a decade ago that I upgraded one of my lab machines to 640MB, because that "ought to be enough for anybody."
But these days it's way way way too small, mostly for browsers and caching. Lenovo's already lost one sale from me by selling a cute little Atom-based slab machine for $199 which only had 512MB in it (or maybe it was 1GB) because the packaging didn't say anything about whether it could be upgraded or not. Yes, I know they need to have a low-config price to get some people to buy it, but it costs less than $50 for 2GB of notebook RAM and even less for desktop RAM, and there's no excuse for making a machine that can't be upgraded.
presumably they'd offer Win7 as an extra-cost downgrade...
Can't they put a starter motor in the thing? I'd hate to have to get out, kick-start the thing, and have it fly away; that'd be almost as bad as having an old crank-start car trying to run you over.
Or is it still Real Soon Now?
ObXKCD
No, square dancing needs four _couples_ to make a set.
Parent article makes a really good point - thanks!
Back in 1999, the world was finally becoming a civilized place. The Soviet Union was gone, 40 years of nuclear terrorism were over, and we were in the trailing edge of a long technology boom even though most of us realized that selling dogfood online might not be an entirely sustainable business model :-)
Two years later the world was going to Hell.
The reason it took Ian Goldberg three hours to crack one of the main GSM algorithms back then is that the Chinese restaurant near campus was having the good lunch special that day - he estimates it would have been more like two hours otherwise. It was really incompetently done, some variant on a fast Fourier transform, and the "we developed it in Seekrit so nobody can crack it" approach meant that there was no adult supervision. Had they developed the standard in public, they'd have been advised to use an algorithm that provided some actual cryptographic protection.
The "malice" part is that the most common implementation sets 10 of the 64 key bits to zero. (And that, of course, depends on whether your carrier even bothers to do the encryption - back when that version of the crack was announced, my GSM-based cellphone would always tell me that encryption wasn't enabled when I made calls, and I'm not sure if the reason it doesn't do that now is that the carrier's behaving themselves or if they just dropped the error message.)
Really, crowdsourcing a problem like this shouldn't be hard - 21 cameras, lots of geeks, Google Earth? How long will they stay hidden? Let's have a contest to find the things!
My last major desktop upgrade (other than disk and RAM) was when the bright purple flash let the magic smoke out of my P266 machine - I replaced it with a 2.4GHz Celeron. I'm about to have to upgrade again, because I want a better display, now that you can get high-resolution LCD screens for under $200. The problem is that my current graphics card can only drive 1280x1024 VGA, so I'll need a new card, but most cards that can do more than 1400x900 use PCI-Express, not AGP. So if I want a new screen, I'll need a new motherboard. Alternatively, if I want a new internal disk drive, they're all SATA these days, so I'll also need either a new SATA card, or just a new motherboard. And of course if I'm getting a new motherboard, that'll need a new CPU :-)
The alternative is that there are some little $200 Atom-CPU boxes that have HDMI; the problem is that they typically come with 1GB RAM and don't say if you can upgrade that (and sorry, 1GB isn't enough for Firefox these days, much less fancy video stuff.) They also need external disk drives to add any significant storage, but that's tolerable.
Just in case you don't want to have to click on a couple of links to get there.
Once you know what it is, the FAQ makes sense, but like way too many FAQs, it starts out by assuming you already know what the thing is and doesn't explain that.
I do remember one time we had our three-levels-up director in on a Saturday when we had a rush project. It was an RFP, not a programming project, it was important to get done and had a short deadline to produce hundreds of pages of accurate interesting responses to inherently dull and boring material. We put him to work photocopying and fetching pizza, and he avoided micromanaging (something he didn't always avoid :-) He probably did add a bit of value to the executive summary part, but I wasn't working on that section. It was a couple of decades ago, and since I still remember it it was probably good for morale...
This was the real terrorism, politicians and generals trying to look tougher than the other side and threatening to blow up the entire world, poisoning us all and maybe causing a nuclear winter to kill off anybody that's left, and it went on for forty fucking years. Back when I was a kid, I had neighbors digging holes in their back yards for bomb shelters, and we'd get drills in elementary school about how to hide in the hallways during nuclear attacks.
Al Qaeda's just some bunch of second-rate lamers they're using as an excuse since there isn't a real Enemy any more. (Yeah, they're evil bastards, but the direct damage they've done is a lot less than the IRA did over a few decades, in spite of the US starting a couple of wars over them.)
While I'm disappointed with Obama in general, one thing he did that was really good was back down on the Bush Administration's radar systems in eastern Europe, which were there to provoke the Russians.
I visited one in Lithuania a few years ago that's open for tours. It's not in the same shiny condition as the US ones in Arizona - the Lithuanian name for their country means "rainy", and rust never sleeps. The lighting's bad, and you don't really trust the electricity not to zap you as you're walking around, and there's this big dark rust-lined hole that's where the missile was. Much of the facility looks like the kind of abandoned factory where you'd set the ending of a B-grade movie, but in worse condition.
And yeah, the folks there were just hanging out waiting to be told to launch a missile to kill a few million people, and knowing that they'd have to launch quickly because a US missile was targeted on them. And they probably didn't have the level of operational protections that the US missiles had.
See - it's just not a problem for most of us pasty white boy types :-)
This topic came up in the 90s, back when there was an ongoing Cypherpunks movement discussing how technology was changing society and how to deal with it. Other than of course using pseudonyms and unlinkable multiple identities, there was also the suggestion of having a service that was constantly publishing disinformation about you, so that any bad stuff that was actually true was lost in the noise of internet trolls claiming that your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries and obsessing about how full of eels your hovercraft might be.
Dude, I hope that wasn't an electric guitar - we couldn't think of hiring anyone for a technology job who did anything that dangerous!
If it's an acoustic guitar, then maybe okay if it's a cheap one and not a Martin. And it it was just a banjo, then meh, whatever, that's ok if you don't play it at the office.
The folks who run jails are done with Michael Vick; they seem to have decided that two years in the can is how much punishment you deserve for running dogfights and killing some of your dogs. That's not the NFL's problem - they're trying to Look Good to the public, and having an employee who (at least in the past) was the kind of vicious asshole who enjoys cruelty to animals probably makes them look worse than having somebody who got caught smoking dope. (And that's different from a player who got caught using steroids, which is cheating, or got caught gambling, which might lead to a player throwing a game to pay some debts.) On the other hand, if Vick puts in enough time doing public service with the Humane Society or whatever, maybe he'll get forgiven by most of the public, but it'll be a tough sell to get people do decide that he's changed.
If Anonymous Coward did something stupid when he was young, well, hopefully it wasn't *too* disreputable, and if you get past the HR department robofiltering when you're applying for a job and get to a real interview with somebody who's found out about it, you may have to admit having been stupid when you were young. Who knows, maybe they were also stupid when they were young :-)
Meanwhile, it helps to have a relatively common name, so the first half million Google hits are about somebody else, and to have enough positive reputation that the most common hits for your name with useful keywords get good references.
In case you've forgotten what a Larrabee was (like I had), it was Intel's planned graphics / vector processing chip, competing with nVidia and AMD / ATI graphics systems. Here's the Wikipedia article.
http://salon.com :-) I mainly read Doonesbury there, plus articles other sites refer to, because I also stopped going there routinely after the paywall hit, and haven't looked at the front page (except for just now...)
(I don't actually know if they carry here live or not. I mainly read Doonesbury there, plus articles where some other source points me to a link at salon.com.)
I don't know if the free receive-only email service I used to register still works reliably, so I won't mention their name, but I haven't had to update the nytimes registration in a few years. You do definitely have to register if you want to comment on articles.
You can always try bugmenot.com. Perhaps the Slashdot "login=anonymous password=coward" works there?
I've usually found that the cartridge that comes with the printer has about half as much ink as a new cartridge - so even if a new printer costs about the same as a new cartridge, it's usually better to get the cartridge. (Not always - sometimes a store will be selling the Model N-1 printer a lot cheaper, and sometimes it's helpful to have a spare printer in case the other one breaks, but it's seldom helpful to have more than one spare.)
Internet services are "enhanced" services, not common-carrier voice. And if you read the blurbs at the beginning of your phone book, you'll see that they've got an AUP that says you're not allowed to use your land-line phone for obscene or harassing phone calls either. (Or the Phone Police will go rip your phone out of the wall.)
While it looks like too many lawyers and non-lawyers were copying other services' AUPs, it looks like what they're really trying to do is give themselves leverage to drop you if you engage in activities that get them hit with too many complaints. That's not the same as saying that they'll go trying to police your postings (yeah, like that would make financial sense), but they want to be able to kill spammers, blog-comment-spammers, and anybody else that causes them trouble.