No, of course not. I use free antivirus, firewall, and antimalware software.
A lot of Windows users get sucked into Norton (etc) "internet security" products though.
As an aside, can you recommend an alternative to GFI for antivirus? It works well enough, but the new version is hard to disable quickly and the interface keeps getting weirder and weirder.
He did sort of weaken his own argument by listing all the versions of XP.
However, I do see a difference between XP and OSX in terms of purchasing. When you buy XP, that's pretty much all you're going to have to buy until the next major version comes out. Granted you might wish to switch to 64 bit or run Media Center, but for most people, it's a buy once deal. Minor upgrades, like SP2, are expected to be free. (Ok ok, yeah we also have to buy antispyware and antivirus software, hardy har:)
OSX is a little weird in this regard. It feels very strange to have to shell out money when that version number on the left side of the decimal point doesn't increment. Sure it's true that Wink2k was NT 5 and Win2003 is NT 5.2, but only geeks ever hear these numbers. I think that this is one very rare failure in Apple's marketing. I'm sure that if you keep up with everything it's not that complicated, but honestly I have no idea which minor version of OSX is named after which animal and exactly what features a version does or does not have. I have OSX on my Mac, and while I admit that my Mac doesn't get the most use of my machines, I still have no clue which version of OSX it is. I knew at some point, but now I'd have to look it up.
Ok, so let's say that I like some hot new feature in a new "minor" release of OSX, and I decide that I want to shell out the bucks for it. Am I also upgrading the actual operating system, or is it essentially the exact same core system but with some new software installed? It's sort of hard to tell from the marketing media, but the fact that I'm paying over $100 for an OS upgrade, I would assume that a lot under the hood is changing....but if that's true then why is the new version only getting a minor increment?
I realize that I could do some research and find all my answers, and I'm not looking for any answers here because I don't care that much about the questions. I'm just pointing out that on the surface it's really unclear to me, and I suspect others, whether these are operating system upgrades or just software add-ons. If it's essentially just some cool new software for the OS, then it would be much more clear if they were released as utility enhancements instead of being packaged as OS upgrades. Regardless, these versions of OSX seem to come out in fairly quick intervals, relatively speaking, which would make me hesitate prior to purchasing an upgrade, because I know that the NEXT paid upgrade will have the features of this upgrade plus more features, and essentially still just be OSX.
Not a big deal regardless. I like OSX. Even on my old G3 the interface feels really solid, while XP on a much faster machine feels flimsy by comparison.
So the key that he's using hasn't hit Microsoft's ban list yet. There could be a number of simple reasons for this as others have pointed out.
None of this has anything to do with legitimate license keys being rejected, which is a completely different problem with the same system. Just because a specific pirated copy of XP passes WGA does not mean that it's likely for legitimate copies of XP to be rejected by WGA.
The nice thing about both of these problems is that they can be fairly easily resolved with a single phone call:)
PS, I didn't RTFA, I'm simply responding to the last line of the quoted text. If there is some reason that this guy's experience has any direct relationship to legitimate copies of XP being flagged as pirated, please correct me.
PS2, I'm no fan of WGA. When I saw it come up in automatic updates on my XP box, I unchecked it. It continues to appear now and then, and often the system doesn't tell me that updates are ready until I'm shutting the machine down, at which point if I accidentally hit the big red shutdown button, WGA will be installed. No way to see which updates will be applied when that happens either.
Yeah audiophiles are very easily fooled. I laugh every time I hear about digital technology being described in analog terms, which is terribly common in the audiophile realm. It's sort of understandable though because "digital" is so variable whenever we interface with the analog world. Not all AD/DA converters are created equal. Audio CD playback is very similar to analog technology in that it's designed play right through and mask errors which can result in high frequency distortion and various other artifacts that one might not expect from "digital" and how that term is marketed. It can be difficult to understand, so why wouldn't the quality of a USB cable be as important as the quality of a microphone cable or the weight of a speaker cable? Well, most of us would say "duh", but the second big problems is that these people can "hear" the difference! Ah the power of suggestion. You won't find a lot of double blind studies published by audiophile gear manufacturers.
Aside from $30,000 speaker cables (I shit you not), my most favorite audiophile product is a wooden knob that costs $500. "What does the wooden knob do, though?" Well, nothing on its own. It is in fact, a wooden knob. A knob made from wood. It sounds great when attached to your volume pot, though. Five hundred dollars please.
So today we learn about a network card that somehow reduces lag by implementing hardcore quality of service on an endpoint that is for all intents and purposes dedicated to a single application. Are gamers analogous to audiophiles? "Quake III is a lot more responsive now. My ping is about the same, but I can feel the difference." It must work though. I mean, who would make something and charge so much for it if it didn't actually work?:)
I agree with you, but these things are new to the non-geek operating system. Yes virtual desktops and file versioning have been available for non-geek operating systems for a long time from third parties, but to have them integrated with the operating system and hopefully "just work" is a step forward. Windows history of copying Mac is about implementing ideas on the consumer desktop, regardless of how long the ideas have been around elsewhere.
(BTW, I am not intending to use the term "geek" negatively. By "non-geek operating system" I simply mean Windows or Mac OS or something that's likely to be on a computer that mom might buy)
I can't believe what I'm seeing, but it looks like this example has taught everyone to stop using PHP for static content! All the bloggers of the world have gone back to using Microsoft Frontpage to create static websites full of bad code and broken templates! This is good news for Slashdot readers, as it should allow at least a half dozen more people to access content before a site on a shared host gets yanked for exceeding its resource quotas.
I would think the opposite. It must be cheaper now to do things with computers than to do them the old fashioned way. Granted this movie won't have the excessive high dollar effects of the prequels, but I'd bet that it's going to be mostly computer animation, and the cheap variety.
Computer animation in movies is really something that I've come to despise. To me it looks considerably worse than old fashioned special effects, especially in lower budget horror and sci fi films, which are my favorite genres (or they were before everything started looking like a video game intro). That's not to say that they can't be done well, it just doesn't happen too often. I'd take the old effects in The Thing or Alien over most new films relying mostly on computer effects.
Buyers of integrated graphics aren't likely to be buying a large volume of video games anyhow, and no gamer that I've ever come across has stopped buying video games because copy protection is annoying.
Here's a thought for the every-whiney video game industry: I'd be much more inclined to go plop down $50 on a new game if I could run it at high resolution with all the detail on with my *AVERAGE* PC. That would impress me a hell of a lot more than awesome new graphics that only people with brand new hardware can fully appreciate. Until then, I'll stick to the bargain bin and stay a couple years behind. I tell you what, the great games from two years ago still look pretty damn amazing when you can run them full detail at high framerates.
Of course that would mean that advances in graphic engines might slow down a bit, and gameplay would have to become more important. Dag, yo.
So let's say that your TV couldn't be turned on by remote control (because it's energy efficient and off means off), thus requiring that you walk all the way over to the set, extend your arm, push the button, retract your arm, and walk back to the sofa. For the sake of argument, let's say that on average, this activity requires approximately one calorie per day per household in the US. So per household, that's 365 calories per year. Since I'm just making shit up, let's also assume that there are 150 million television-bearing households.
The amount of energy required then to manually turn on the television in the US alone is 54.75 BILLION calories.
In the US we pretty much only eat hamburgers. A single 1/4 pound lean beef patty contains 290 calories. So the number of beef patties required to power US citizens for the sole task of turning the television on and off by hand is 188,793,103.
Folks, that's almost 189 MILLION quarter pound beef patties. That's 47.25 MILLION pounds of beef.
Using my keen powers of google, I've determined that the average amount of beef we get from a single cow is just about 500 pounds. Hold on to your buns, because this is going make your mustard: the number of cows required to power US humans for an entire year of turning the TV on and off without the assistance of a remote control is 94,500.
Nintey four thousand five hundred cows.
Now prepare to be exagerated into oblivion. I'm about as knowledgable about ranching as you are about energy production, but from what I'm able to google, it looks like a single cow is probably going to eat from 4 to 10 acres of grass per year. Now cows do have a tendancy to grow before reaching maturity, and little cows probably don't eat as much as big cows, but it does look like beef cows get to live for just about two years. We also have to consider that we need to maintain one heffer per calf until cloning technology becomes more advanced. So I think we can safely say that for each cow, we're going to require 10 acres of grass per year.
That's 945,000 acres of grass per year required to turn our televisions on and off the old fashioned way.
That's a lot of grass. 1,476 square miles to be precise. People, that's the entire state of Rhode Island. Enough land for over 1,000,000 people to live and play.
Now it should be clear to everyone that if we figure out how much nitrogen and water and other various stuff is required per grazing acre, we'll end up with some really big numbers. Let's just say the numbers are definately going to be in the millions, and that's definately not small.
So, I think I've made my point. The next time you think about those 2 watts of wasted energy here and there and decide to multiply that number until it's a really big number, try to also think about the cows.
Yes, it's called "Software Assurance." It is not possible to get upgrade pricing with Microsoft open licensing. You are either required to purchase SA with your licenses, or buy future licenses at full price. This keeps you locked in. Sometimes you save money if the next version comes out before your SA expires and your company decides it wants the new features. Sometimes you don't save money if you decide that you don't need the next version, or there's a lovely four year gap between versions and your SA is only good for 2 years.
It works because if you *could* have saved a lot of money but chose not to, then you're going to look like a serious idiot. If you don't save money but pretty much break even, you stay off the CFO's radar. So you might as well purchase SA, with the one serious drawback being that you're stuck with MS Office because you've not only paid for it, but you've prepaid for the next version. Bonk.
This doesn't affect individual users. It also doesn't affect companies that are quite content using very old versions of MS Office.
The ability to separate content from layout is indeed a great benefit, but I'd hardly call CSS a dream. Something as trivial as a three or four column liquid layout can be frustrating to get working correctly in one browser, and absolutely maddening to get working across all the browsers you're trying to support (I think this topic is responsible for the largest number of completely incorrect online tutorials in the history of online tutorials). Any sort of horizontal positioning is a pain, really. There are too many ways to skin that cat. If you break down and use a table it's trivial, but then you're stuck with that damn table in your source and you lose a lot of options down the road. CSS is currently very limited in its capabilities to produce many what are now "normal" designs in an effective, intuitive manner, and needs a major overhaul.
Precise alignment is also very troublesome across multiple browsers, and I'm not just going to rip on IE. With a table it's again trivial to take a split image and piece it back together and have it render properly across all your browsers. Trying to accomplish the same thing with CSS is horrible. From major IE flaws that require code hiding tricks to minor little one pixel inconsistancies between better browsers like Firefox and Opera 8, the process is not fun or efficient.
One thing I'd like to know is if there is a more detailed standard that browser developers use, or do they just use the same standards documentation that web designers use? I've never looked into it. It seems to me that if there are no detailed instructions to browsers developers on the exact way that the box model should be implemented, for instance, then it's no wonder there are so many differences. Do you include the border width in the width of your element? If your container width is currently at say 100 pixels and you have three inline elements with widths of 33.3% each, is the combined width of those elements going to be 100 pixels or 99 pixels? Simple questions with different answers depending on who you render with.
In the past couple years I've come around to the idea of strict XHTML and CSS compliance and have found that when you start with the standards in mind, the long term benefits are great. Just the ability to quickly check code with a parser is a godsend. I don't like trying to come up with new layouts though. "Ok, this one is working on everything from Konquerer to Mac IE 5.2...my next few designs are all going to look pretty similar, but damnit they're going to work."
Re:Internet Connection Losing CSS data??? WTF???
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Dvorak Rants on CSS
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Well I think we all know what he's talking about, but he just doesn't understand why it's happening.
He must be talking about the browser having an old version of the css file(s) cached, which can of course produce some "interesting" visuals. This can happen in most browsers, and anybody who's done design work has probably run into it a time or two. Forced refresh clears it right up.
I think the bigger problem is storing passwords in plaintext to begin with. I can think of no reason to do this in an online banking system. There are a dozen ways to hash a password without any real work on the part of the developer (in its simplest form, a slight modification to the query is all that's required). Forgotten passwords should always result in a reset.
I have a hard time believing that a bank would have such a silly system in place though. Perhaps they restrict passwords to reduce support calls, or maybe they view writing down strong passwords to remember them as a larger problem than weak passwords. Neither excuse seems reasonable. Isn't banking software regulated in any way?
In a corporate environment you're not going to be using Windows Update, you'll be using something like Windows Software Update Services (at the least) which gives IT complete control over which updates go out to clients. No bothersome "geninue advantage" type crap necessary (yet). Thankfully WSUS is free, and is one of the few MS server products that I'm actually very happy to be running.
Well you have to factor in the additional costs such as mandatory benefits (unemployment insurance, social security, comp, etc), administration, facilities, additional benefits (healthcare, vacation, etc), family/military leave, and so on. While I'm sure the average manager was paid very well and some were paid extremely well, the average annual salary per manager wasn't a million dollars.
I think I read recently that on average employers are paying nearly 30% above wages just for mandatory and optional benefits alone. I don't think that includes the cost of administration and facilities. (feel free to post a real number if that value is way off, I could be wrong).
Granted that could still mean that the average salary was like $700,000, which isn't exactly chump change!
Paying employees well is something that I'm not going to have gripes with, though, as long as the wealth is distributed fairly (not equally, but fairly) and the company has the foresight to not run into a situation where it has to axe thousands of employees to make ends meet. People are the most important resource of any business, and its important to not overpay nor underappreciate.
These savings are just 1/38th of what Intel brought in last year, and somewhere around 1/10th of their profit. Trimming the fat is always a good idea, but when that "fat" is human beings who are depending on their jobs, employers have a certain responsibility to not get bloated in terms of workforce. The good thing is that these are obviously well-paid managers (unless just a few are making huge bank), and might not be as bad off as employees living paycheck to paycheck with few assets.
Although we shouldn't be talking about this in terms of gasoline, the US alone consumes 400 billion gallons of gasoline per year.
So if the XBox or whatever did actually consume gasoline, all of them together would consume only 0.000004375% the amount of gasoline currently used in the US per year. That is not a lot of gas if you look at it that way.
If you were working on a budget for a major purchase of say, a house, that's going to cost exactly $400,000, would you be concerned if the price went up by 0.000004375%? Probably not. If you can come up with 400 grand then you can probably spare an additional $1.75.
Waste, regardless of its form, is usually a bad thing. However there are minimums below which certain types of waste are virtually unnoticable, even if they accumulate. If it takes more energy (regardless of the type) to save on waste than what the savings provide, you're still wasting energy.
Where I live, we've had several very warm winters and summers in a row. Apparently this was due to the folly of mankind.
Yet this past winter was pretty "normal", and this spring is about as normal as springs can be. I guess we must have fixed that global warming problem.
See, it's the whole correlation is not causation thing. You can't rely on anecdotal evidence like "boy, this is some weird weather we're having" to prove that some major climate change is underway, and to take it one step further and say that it's our fault.
When has weather not been weird? Well, all the time, but people only talk about the weather when it is weird. It's not uncommon for it to snow here in June and/or August when it's supposed to be summer weather, yet every year when it happens people act amazed. Personally I've made it a point to frequently say things like "boy, this is some pretty normal weather we're having," because I just crack myself up.
I'm not saying that global warming isn't observable or real, but I'm not ready to buy into the extreme hype. I don't think it's very responsible to start talking about global warming every single time the weather is "unseasonable." Sometimes it rains all summer long. Sometimes we have draughts and everything burns. Sometimes winter is cold as hell and everything freezes solid. Sometimes winter is mild and sunny. Welcome to Earth.
It's pretty common for humans to look inward whenever something bigger than us seems to be on the horizon. "Oh no, what did we do wrong?" It's important to keep a level head and not just go hurl a bunch of virgins into volcanos.
I am an environmentally-minded person, and try to focus more on individual ecosystems where cause and effect are more clear. Certainly we need to be cleaner. Certainly we need to be cautious with natural resources. I think that the issue of global warming pulls the focus away from the obvious, clear evidence, out into a highly argumentative "end of the world" swamp of a debate. This may not have the intended impact on people, and may in fact may do just the opposite.
So I'm not too sure about where I stand on the issue of global warming yet. I'm simply not going to assume global warming is responsible every time we have a record high or a record low... especially when those records are often set fifty to one-hundred years ago. What was happening back then? What was happening before we had good weather records across the globe, just a fairly short time ago?
Could it be that as our capacity to observe increases, so does the amount of "stuff" that we observe?
One thing I am fairly certain of: if the global warming is caused by mankind's industrialization over the past century, and we're already at a point where it threatens the entire world, then we're so very screwed. We might be up shit creek regardless, as it usually takes an in-your-face problem for people to react with enough effort to make a real difference. Clearly we've already destroyed a lot of the natural environment, and maybe that's part of our role in nature. I hope not, and will continue to oppose irresponsible use of natural resources.
You may have been lucky. Referer is set by the client, thus is trivial to spoof. Never rely on referer for any kind of security measure or request verification.
If you're an application developer, yeah that makes sense. There is a very narrow range of applications that are well-suited to be implemented on the framework of an existing spreadsheet application. The rest of the time it seems like developers are just trying to take advantage of the spreadsheet's interface, but it just ends up creating a whole lot of difficult macro work, especially if the macro code is supposed to interface with some external program. It all feels very shakey once you get more complex than the most trivial of projects. And users often hate it anyhow because installation is always more difficult, upgrading the spreadsheet application can break things, and it's hard to troubleshoot when you're not sure how things are interacting under the covers.
If you're an end user, however, creating a database solution can be much more difficult than creating a spreadsheet, especially for those who are unfamiliar with the concepts. Besides, a person using MS Access is just as dangerous as one using Excel when they start pumping out macros.
Also, if you've ever seen someone who is very proficient at the use of spreadsheets, they can do some amazing things very quickly. I've noticed that these people tend to use spreadsheets correctly, however, as a sort of "super advanced" calculator. They don't use them to keep track of everything that can be put into tabular format.
The problem is that there's too much *trust* in the spreadsheet application. I see this on a frequent basis. When people do things by hand, they are already in the frame of mind that they could have made mistakes, and they're more likely to double check their work and they're not as eager to dismiss the potential for error. When people do things with spreadsheets, they're much more likely to completely accept whatever answer it spits out.
This is why we have software validation. As developers we know damn well that errors are bound to crop up because we appreciate the complexity of software. End users writing macros very seldom have this appreciation. After all, they don't check their hand held calculators for errors, why should a spreadsheet be any different?
That 1% of cells have an error figure is kind of silly, but if it's taken at face value, it has much more of an impact than you claim. So for every one hundred cells in a spreadsheet, one of them is bound to have an error. This number is low enough to where people aren't going to be on the lookout for errors, and high enough as to have a major impact on the decisions that are made based on the spreadsheet output.
I once dealt with a spreadsheet application that had an error in a macro that would only show itself on very specific data sets that only occured about 5% of the time. The numbers that were coming out *looked* about right, and with the spreadsheet able to correctly calculate values on 95% of the data coming in, it was highly trusted since every time it was verified, it turned out to be correct. Clearly the testing on it was piss poor, and it wasn't "verified" frequently enough for this error to surface. People started trusting this spreadsheet so much that if somebody did try to do something by hand and it didn't match the output from the spreadsheet, the person was very likely to just assume they had made a mistake, and the calculation was complex enough that people often did make mistakes when performing it. The end result wasn't good, and had a direct impact on quality and reporting that wasn't found for a couple of years. Nothing terribly critical, but still costly. I can certainly see how big, very costly mistakes could be made without much effort at all. What's really interesting is that two individuals performing a complex calculation and comparing results is more reliable than trusting the results from a macro which is supposedly doing everything that the people are doing by hand.
So who cares? I guess anybody using spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are a disaster waiting to happen when they're misused, and they frequently are. This isn't news, it's an old problem and I'd be suprised if this is the first time you've heard of it.
I don't think it's a sign that they're falling, necessarily. I do think that companies need to really think about the way actions like this make them look though. From the company's perspective, here's a way to make some bucks without doing anything. Ok, good. But from the customer's point of view, this company is looking a little sad and cheap.
Has anyone noticed the Google Ads on VIA's driver/support page? Now that's professional. (yes, sarcasm)
PDF Creator saved us mega bucks in Acrobat licensing because all my users needed was the ability to print to a PDF. It also saved me some grief because I don't have to maintain different versions of Acrobat and Acrobat Reader (i.e. the latest reader coupled with an older Acrobat, because there's no reason to spend the money to upgrade). PDF Creator is also nice because it works fine with restricted user accounts and doesn't require a process to be running to work - with Acrobat, if "acrotray.exe" isn't running and you try to print to the Distiller, it crashes hard and usually takes out the calling application as well.
In the thousands and thousands of print jobs sent through PDF Creator, I can only think of a few that didn't come out looking great. In fact, when I prepare graphics for the press I use PDF Creator to generate proofs because it's more reliable (and/or easier) than using the PDF converters in Creative Suite.
I need to talk to the CFO about a donation to the project.
Hey, does anyone know of a small-footprint PDF viewer for Windoze without all the fluff of Acrobat Reader? All it would have to do is display correctly and allow basic forms to be filled in. Acrobat Reader loads itself too slowly, loads PDFs from the net in a non-intuitive "hey what's going on?" kind of way, crashes web browsers, has a horrible installer, calls home and nags users, and just plain has too much shit going on for (my) average users.
Anyhow, I could care less if Vista doesn't have PDF creation out of the box. Even if it did, I'd probably still use PDF Creator. When I find something that works I tend to stick with it.
I'm in Montana as well, and using Bresnan for internet service. I recently downloaded a couple ISOs at over 870KB/s and thought "what the heck?" That translates to what, around 7mbps?
I went and checked Bresnan's site and they're still advertising the old 3mbps service, so I thought maybe something was "wrong" with my service, but I sure as hell wasn't going to call and ask!
8mbps really makes the $55 bill that much less difficult to pay! I'm routinely getting 400-800KB/s sustained downloads from a variety of sources. Very nice.
Slashdot Mirror
Refer back to this post after your first child turns 10.
No, of course not. I use free antivirus, firewall, and antimalware software.
A lot of Windows users get sucked into Norton (etc) "internet security" products though.
As an aside, can you recommend an alternative to GFI for antivirus? It works well enough, but the new version is hard to disable quickly and the interface keeps getting weirder and weirder.
He did sort of weaken his own argument by listing all the versions of XP.
:)
However, I do see a difference between XP and OSX in terms of purchasing. When you buy XP, that's pretty much all you're going to have to buy until the next major version comes out. Granted you might wish to switch to 64 bit or run Media Center, but for most people, it's a buy once deal. Minor upgrades, like SP2, are expected to be free. (Ok ok, yeah we also have to buy antispyware and antivirus software, hardy har
OSX is a little weird in this regard. It feels very strange to have to shell out money when that version number on the left side of the decimal point doesn't increment. Sure it's true that Wink2k was NT 5 and Win2003 is NT 5.2, but only geeks ever hear these numbers. I think that this is one very rare failure in Apple's marketing. I'm sure that if you keep up with everything it's not that complicated, but honestly I have no idea which minor version of OSX is named after which animal and exactly what features a version does or does not have. I have OSX on my Mac, and while I admit that my Mac doesn't get the most use of my machines, I still have no clue which version of OSX it is. I knew at some point, but now I'd have to look it up.
Ok, so let's say that I like some hot new feature in a new "minor" release of OSX, and I decide that I want to shell out the bucks for it. Am I also upgrading the actual operating system, or is it essentially the exact same core system but with some new software installed? It's sort of hard to tell from the marketing media, but the fact that I'm paying over $100 for an OS upgrade, I would assume that a lot under the hood is changing....but if that's true then why is the new version only getting a minor increment?
I realize that I could do some research and find all my answers, and I'm not looking for any answers here because I don't care that much about the questions. I'm just pointing out that on the surface it's really unclear to me, and I suspect others, whether these are operating system upgrades or just software add-ons. If it's essentially just some cool new software for the OS, then it would be much more clear if they were released as utility enhancements instead of being packaged as OS upgrades. Regardless, these versions of OSX seem to come out in fairly quick intervals, relatively speaking, which would make me hesitate prior to purchasing an upgrade, because I know that the NEXT paid upgrade will have the features of this upgrade plus more features, and essentially still just be OSX.
Not a big deal regardless. I like OSX. Even on my old G3 the interface feels really solid, while XP on a much faster machine feels flimsy by comparison.
So the key that he's using hasn't hit Microsoft's ban list yet. There could be a number of simple reasons for this as others have pointed out.
:)
None of this has anything to do with legitimate license keys being rejected, which is a completely different problem with the same system. Just because a specific pirated copy of XP passes WGA does not mean that it's likely for legitimate copies of XP to be rejected by WGA.
The nice thing about both of these problems is that they can be fairly easily resolved with a single phone call
PS, I didn't RTFA, I'm simply responding to the last line of the quoted text. If there is some reason that this guy's experience has any direct relationship to legitimate copies of XP being flagged as pirated, please correct me.
PS2, I'm no fan of WGA. When I saw it come up in automatic updates on my XP box, I unchecked it. It continues to appear now and then, and often the system doesn't tell me that updates are ready until I'm shutting the machine down, at which point if I accidentally hit the big red shutdown button, WGA will be installed. No way to see which updates will be applied when that happens either.
Yeah audiophiles are very easily fooled. I laugh every time I hear about digital technology being described in analog terms, which is terribly common in the audiophile realm. It's sort of understandable though because "digital" is so variable whenever we interface with the analog world. Not all AD/DA converters are created equal. Audio CD playback is very similar to analog technology in that it's designed play right through and mask errors which can result in high frequency distortion and various other artifacts that one might not expect from "digital" and how that term is marketed. It can be difficult to understand, so why wouldn't the quality of a USB cable be as important as the quality of a microphone cable or the weight of a speaker cable? Well, most of us would say "duh", but the second big problems is that these people can "hear" the difference! Ah the power of suggestion. You won't find a lot of double blind studies published by audiophile gear manufacturers.
:)
Aside from $30,000 speaker cables (I shit you not), my most favorite audiophile product is a wooden knob that costs $500. "What does the wooden knob do, though?" Well, nothing on its own. It is in fact, a wooden knob. A knob made from wood. It sounds great when attached to your volume pot, though. Five hundred dollars please.
So today we learn about a network card that somehow reduces lag by implementing hardcore quality of service on an endpoint that is for all intents and purposes dedicated to a single application. Are gamers analogous to audiophiles? "Quake III is a lot more responsive now. My ping is about the same, but I can feel the difference." It must work though. I mean, who would make something and charge so much for it if it didn't actually work?
I agree with you, but these things are new to the non-geek operating system. Yes virtual desktops and file versioning have been available for non-geek operating systems for a long time from third parties, but to have them integrated with the operating system and hopefully "just work" is a step forward. Windows history of copying Mac is about implementing ideas on the consumer desktop, regardless of how long the ideas have been around elsewhere.
(BTW, I am not intending to use the term "geek" negatively. By "non-geek operating system" I simply mean Windows or Mac OS or something that's likely to be on a computer that mom might buy)
I can't believe what I'm seeing, but it looks like this example has taught everyone to stop using PHP for static content! All the bloggers of the world have gone back to using Microsoft Frontpage to create static websites full of bad code and broken templates! This is good news for Slashdot readers, as it should allow at least a half dozen more people to access content before a site on a shared host gets yanked for exceeding its resource quotas.
I would think the opposite. It must be cheaper now to do things with computers than to do them the old fashioned way. Granted this movie won't have the excessive high dollar effects of the prequels, but I'd bet that it's going to be mostly computer animation, and the cheap variety.
Computer animation in movies is really something that I've come to despise. To me it looks considerably worse than old fashioned special effects, especially in lower budget horror and sci fi films, which are my favorite genres (or they were before everything started looking like a video game intro). That's not to say that they can't be done well, it just doesn't happen too often. I'd take the old effects in The Thing or Alien over most new films relying mostly on computer effects.
Buyers of integrated graphics aren't likely to be buying a large volume of video games anyhow, and no gamer that I've ever come across has stopped buying video games because copy protection is annoying.
Here's a thought for the every-whiney video game industry: I'd be much more inclined to go plop down $50 on a new game if I could run it at high resolution with all the detail on with my *AVERAGE* PC. That would impress me a hell of a lot more than awesome new graphics that only people with brand new hardware can fully appreciate. Until then, I'll stick to the bargain bin and stay a couple years behind. I tell you what, the great games from two years ago still look pretty damn amazing when you can run them full detail at high framerates.
Of course that would mean that advances in graphic engines might slow down a bit, and gameplay would have to become more important. Dag, yo.
So let's say that your TV couldn't be turned on by remote control (because it's energy efficient and off means off), thus requiring that you walk all the way over to the set, extend your arm, push the button, retract your arm, and walk back to the sofa. For the sake of argument, let's say that on average, this activity requires approximately one calorie per day per household in the US. So per household, that's 365 calories per year. Since I'm just making shit up, let's also assume that there are 150 million television-bearing households.
The amount of energy required then to manually turn on the television in the US alone is 54.75 BILLION calories.
In the US we pretty much only eat hamburgers. A single 1/4 pound lean beef patty contains 290 calories. So the number of beef patties required to power US citizens for the sole task of turning the television on and off by hand is 188,793,103.
Folks, that's almost 189 MILLION quarter pound beef patties. That's 47.25 MILLION pounds of beef.
Using my keen powers of google, I've determined that the average amount of beef we get from a single cow is just about 500 pounds. Hold on to your buns, because this is going make your mustard: the number of cows required to power US humans for an entire year of turning the TV on and off without the assistance of a remote control is 94,500.
Nintey four thousand five hundred cows.
Now prepare to be exagerated into oblivion. I'm about as knowledgable about ranching as you are about energy production, but from what I'm able to google, it looks like a single cow is probably going to eat from 4 to 10 acres of grass per year. Now cows do have a tendancy to grow before reaching maturity, and little cows probably don't eat as much as big cows, but it does look like beef cows get to live for just about two years. We also have to consider that we need to maintain one heffer per calf until cloning technology becomes more advanced. So I think we can safely say that for each cow, we're going to require 10 acres of grass per year.
That's 945,000 acres of grass per year required to turn our televisions on and off the old fashioned way.
That's a lot of grass. 1,476 square miles to be precise. People, that's the entire state of Rhode Island. Enough land for over 1,000,000 people to live and play.
Now it should be clear to everyone that if we figure out how much nitrogen and water and other various stuff is required per grazing acre, we'll end up with some really big numbers. Let's just say the numbers are definately going to be in the millions, and that's definately not small.
So, I think I've made my point. The next time you think about those 2 watts of wasted energy here and there and decide to multiply that number until it's a really big number, try to also think about the cows.
Yes, it's called "Software Assurance." It is not possible to get upgrade pricing with Microsoft open licensing. You are either required to purchase SA with your licenses, or buy future licenses at full price. This keeps you locked in. Sometimes you save money if the next version comes out before your SA expires and your company decides it wants the new features. Sometimes you don't save money if you decide that you don't need the next version, or there's a lovely four year gap between versions and your SA is only good for 2 years.
It works because if you *could* have saved a lot of money but chose not to, then you're going to look like a serious idiot. If you don't save money but pretty much break even, you stay off the CFO's radar. So you might as well purchase SA, with the one serious drawback being that you're stuck with MS Office because you've not only paid for it, but you've prepaid for the next version. Bonk.
This doesn't affect individual users. It also doesn't affect companies that are quite content using very old versions of MS Office.
There are times when it is necessary, especially when you're not sticking to a fixed width design.
The ability to separate content from layout is indeed a great benefit, but I'd hardly call CSS a dream. Something as trivial as a three or four column liquid layout can be frustrating to get working correctly in one browser, and absolutely maddening to get working across all the browsers you're trying to support (I think this topic is responsible for the largest number of completely incorrect online tutorials in the history of online tutorials). Any sort of horizontal positioning is a pain, really. There are too many ways to skin that cat. If you break down and use a table it's trivial, but then you're stuck with that damn table in your source and you lose a lot of options down the road. CSS is currently very limited in its capabilities to produce many what are now "normal" designs in an effective, intuitive manner, and needs a major overhaul.
Precise alignment is also very troublesome across multiple browsers, and I'm not just going to rip on IE. With a table it's again trivial to take a split image and piece it back together and have it render properly across all your browsers. Trying to accomplish the same thing with CSS is horrible. From major IE flaws that require code hiding tricks to minor little one pixel inconsistancies between better browsers like Firefox and Opera 8, the process is not fun or efficient.
One thing I'd like to know is if there is a more detailed standard that browser developers use, or do they just use the same standards documentation that web designers use? I've never looked into it. It seems to me that if there are no detailed instructions to browsers developers on the exact way that the box model should be implemented, for instance, then it's no wonder there are so many differences. Do you include the border width in the width of your element? If your container width is currently at say 100 pixels and you have three inline elements with widths of 33.3% each, is the combined width of those elements going to be 100 pixels or 99 pixels? Simple questions with different answers depending on who you render with.
In the past couple years I've come around to the idea of strict XHTML and CSS compliance and have found that when you start with the standards in mind, the long term benefits are great. Just the ability to quickly check code with a parser is a godsend. I don't like trying to come up with new layouts though. "Ok, this one is working on everything from Konquerer to Mac IE 5.2...my next few designs are all going to look pretty similar, but damnit they're going to work."
Well I think we all know what he's talking about, but he just doesn't understand why it's happening.
He must be talking about the browser having an old version of the css file(s) cached, which can of course produce some "interesting" visuals. This can happen in most browsers, and anybody who's done design work has probably run into it a time or two. Forced refresh clears it right up.
I think the bigger problem is storing passwords in plaintext to begin with. I can think of no reason to do this in an online banking system. There are a dozen ways to hash a password without any real work on the part of the developer (in its simplest form, a slight modification to the query is all that's required). Forgotten passwords should always result in a reset.
I have a hard time believing that a bank would have such a silly system in place though. Perhaps they restrict passwords to reduce support calls, or maybe they view writing down strong passwords to remember them as a larger problem than weak passwords. Neither excuse seems reasonable. Isn't banking software regulated in any way?
In a corporate environment you're not going to be using Windows Update, you'll be using something like Windows Software Update Services (at the least) which gives IT complete control over which updates go out to clients. No bothersome "geninue advantage" type crap necessary (yet). Thankfully WSUS is free, and is one of the few MS server products that I'm actually very happy to be running.
Well you have to factor in the additional costs such as mandatory benefits (unemployment insurance, social security, comp, etc), administration, facilities, additional benefits (healthcare, vacation, etc), family/military leave, and so on. While I'm sure the average manager was paid very well and some were paid extremely well, the average annual salary per manager wasn't a million dollars.
I think I read recently that on average employers are paying nearly 30% above wages just for mandatory and optional benefits alone. I don't think that includes the cost of administration and facilities. (feel free to post a real number if that value is way off, I could be wrong).
Granted that could still mean that the average salary was like $700,000, which isn't exactly chump change!
Paying employees well is something that I'm not going to have gripes with, though, as long as the wealth is distributed fairly (not equally, but fairly) and the company has the foresight to not run into a situation where it has to axe thousands of employees to make ends meet. People are the most important resource of any business, and its important to not overpay nor underappreciate.
These savings are just 1/38th of what Intel brought in last year, and somewhere around 1/10th of their profit. Trimming the fat is always a good idea, but when that "fat" is human beings who are depending on their jobs, employers have a certain responsibility to not get bloated in terms of workforce. The good thing is that these are obviously well-paid managers (unless just a few are making huge bank), and might not be as bad off as employees living paycheck to paycheck with few assets.
Although we shouldn't be talking about this in terms of gasoline, the US alone consumes 400 billion gallons of gasoline per year.
So if the XBox or whatever did actually consume gasoline, all of them together would consume only 0.000004375% the amount of gasoline currently used in the US per year. That is not a lot of gas if you look at it that way.
If you were working on a budget for a major purchase of say, a house, that's going to cost exactly $400,000, would you be concerned if the price went up by 0.000004375%? Probably not. If you can come up with 400 grand then you can probably spare an additional $1.75.
Waste, regardless of its form, is usually a bad thing. However there are minimums below which certain types of waste are virtually unnoticable, even if they accumulate. If it takes more energy (regardless of the type) to save on waste than what the savings provide, you're still wasting energy.
Hmmm.
Where I live, we've had several very warm winters and summers in a row. Apparently this was due to the folly of mankind.
Yet this past winter was pretty "normal", and this spring is about as normal as springs can be. I guess we must have fixed that global warming problem.
See, it's the whole correlation is not causation thing. You can't rely on anecdotal evidence like "boy, this is some weird weather we're having" to prove that some major climate change is underway, and to take it one step further and say that it's our fault.
When has weather not been weird? Well, all the time, but people only talk about the weather when it is weird. It's not uncommon for it to snow here in June and/or August when it's supposed to be summer weather, yet every year when it happens people act amazed. Personally I've made it a point to frequently say things like "boy, this is some pretty normal weather we're having," because I just crack myself up.
I'm not saying that global warming isn't observable or real, but I'm not ready to buy into the extreme hype. I don't think it's very responsible to start talking about global warming every single time the weather is "unseasonable." Sometimes it rains all summer long. Sometimes we have draughts and everything burns. Sometimes winter is cold as hell and everything freezes solid. Sometimes winter is mild and sunny. Welcome to Earth.
It's pretty common for humans to look inward whenever something bigger than us seems to be on the horizon. "Oh no, what did we do wrong?" It's important to keep a level head and not just go hurl a bunch of virgins into volcanos.
I am an environmentally-minded person, and try to focus more on individual ecosystems where cause and effect are more clear. Certainly we need to be cleaner. Certainly we need to be cautious with natural resources. I think that the issue of global warming pulls the focus away from the obvious, clear evidence, out into a highly argumentative "end of the world" swamp of a debate. This may not have the intended impact on people, and may in fact may do just the opposite.
So I'm not too sure about where I stand on the issue of global warming yet. I'm simply not going to assume global warming is responsible every time we have a record high or a record low... especially when those records are often set fifty to one-hundred years ago. What was happening back then? What was happening before we had good weather records across the globe, just a fairly short time ago?
Could it be that as our capacity to observe increases, so does the amount of "stuff" that we observe?
One thing I am fairly certain of: if the global warming is caused by mankind's industrialization over the past century, and we're already at a point where it threatens the entire world, then we're so very screwed. We might be up shit creek regardless, as it usually takes an in-your-face problem for people to react with enough effort to make a real difference. Clearly we've already destroyed a lot of the natural environment, and maybe that's part of our role in nature. I hope not, and will continue to oppose irresponsible use of natural resources.
You may have been lucky. Referer is set by the client, thus is trivial to spoof. Never rely on referer for any kind of security measure or request verification.
If you're an application developer, yeah that makes sense. There is a very narrow range of applications that are well-suited to be implemented on the framework of an existing spreadsheet application. The rest of the time it seems like developers are just trying to take advantage of the spreadsheet's interface, but it just ends up creating a whole lot of difficult macro work, especially if the macro code is supposed to interface with some external program. It all feels very shakey once you get more complex than the most trivial of projects. And users often hate it anyhow because installation is always more difficult, upgrading the spreadsheet application can break things, and it's hard to troubleshoot when you're not sure how things are interacting under the covers.
If you're an end user, however, creating a database solution can be much more difficult than creating a spreadsheet, especially for those who are unfamiliar with the concepts. Besides, a person using MS Access is just as dangerous as one using Excel when they start pumping out macros.
Also, if you've ever seen someone who is very proficient at the use of spreadsheets, they can do some amazing things very quickly. I've noticed that these people tend to use spreadsheets correctly, however, as a sort of "super advanced" calculator. They don't use them to keep track of everything that can be put into tabular format.
The problem is that there's too much *trust* in the spreadsheet application. I see this on a frequent basis. When people do things by hand, they are already in the frame of mind that they could have made mistakes, and they're more likely to double check their work and they're not as eager to dismiss the potential for error. When people do things with spreadsheets, they're much more likely to completely accept whatever answer it spits out.
This is why we have software validation. As developers we know damn well that errors are bound to crop up because we appreciate the complexity of software. End users writing macros very seldom have this appreciation. After all, they don't check their hand held calculators for errors, why should a spreadsheet be any different?
That 1% of cells have an error figure is kind of silly, but if it's taken at face value, it has much more of an impact than you claim. So for every one hundred cells in a spreadsheet, one of them is bound to have an error. This number is low enough to where people aren't going to be on the lookout for errors, and high enough as to have a major impact on the decisions that are made based on the spreadsheet output.
I once dealt with a spreadsheet application that had an error in a macro that would only show itself on very specific data sets that only occured about 5% of the time. The numbers that were coming out *looked* about right, and with the spreadsheet able to correctly calculate values on 95% of the data coming in, it was highly trusted since every time it was verified, it turned out to be correct. Clearly the testing on it was piss poor, and it wasn't "verified" frequently enough for this error to surface. People started trusting this spreadsheet so much that if somebody did try to do something by hand and it didn't match the output from the spreadsheet, the person was very likely to just assume they had made a mistake, and the calculation was complex enough that people often did make mistakes when performing it. The end result wasn't good, and had a direct impact on quality and reporting that wasn't found for a couple of years. Nothing terribly critical, but still costly. I can certainly see how big, very costly mistakes could be made without much effort at all. What's really interesting is that two individuals performing a complex calculation and comparing results is more reliable than trusting the results from a macro which is supposedly doing everything that the people are doing by hand.
So who cares? I guess anybody using spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are a disaster waiting to happen when they're misused, and they frequently are. This isn't news, it's an old problem and I'd be suprised if this is the first time you've heard of it.
I don't think it's a sign that they're falling, necessarily. I do think that companies need to really think about the way actions like this make them look though. From the company's perspective, here's a way to make some bucks without doing anything. Ok, good. But from the customer's point of view, this company is looking a little sad and cheap.
Has anyone noticed the Google Ads on VIA's driver/support page? Now that's professional. (yes, sarcasm)
PDF Creator saved us mega bucks in Acrobat licensing because all my users needed was the ability to print to a PDF. It also saved me some grief because I don't have to maintain different versions of Acrobat and Acrobat Reader (i.e. the latest reader coupled with an older Acrobat, because there's no reason to spend the money to upgrade). PDF Creator is also nice because it works fine with restricted user accounts and doesn't require a process to be running to work - with Acrobat, if "acrotray.exe" isn't running and you try to print to the Distiller, it crashes hard and usually takes out the calling application as well.
In the thousands and thousands of print jobs sent through PDF Creator, I can only think of a few that didn't come out looking great. In fact, when I prepare graphics for the press I use PDF Creator to generate proofs because it's more reliable (and/or easier) than using the PDF converters in Creative Suite.
I need to talk to the CFO about a donation to the project.
Hey, does anyone know of a small-footprint PDF viewer for Windoze without all the fluff of Acrobat Reader? All it would have to do is display correctly and allow basic forms to be filled in. Acrobat Reader loads itself too slowly, loads PDFs from the net in a non-intuitive "hey what's going on?" kind of way, crashes web browsers, has a horrible installer, calls home and nags users, and just plain has too much shit going on for (my) average users.
Anyhow, I could care less if Vista doesn't have PDF creation out of the box. Even if it did, I'd probably still use PDF Creator. When I find something that works I tend to stick with it.
So THAT'S what happened!!!!
I'm in Montana as well, and using Bresnan for internet service. I recently downloaded a couple ISOs at over 870KB/s and thought "what the heck?" That translates to what, around 7mbps?
I went and checked Bresnan's site and they're still advertising the old 3mbps service, so I thought maybe something was "wrong" with my service, but I sure as hell wasn't going to call and ask!
8mbps really makes the $55 bill that much less difficult to pay! I'm routinely getting 400-800KB/s sustained downloads from a variety of sources. Very nice.