I wouldn't say that your situation is unique, but you happen to be on the lucky side of the fence.
I've never had more than a 50% success rate with hibernation or standby on Windows PCs. The most frequent problem is that the machine will take a nap quite easily at the touch of a button, but it won't wake up without physically powering the machine off and back on, thus losing everything the user had going.
This problem coupled with Microsoft's brilliant keyboard design notion of putting the sleep button right next to the calculator button has made it necessary that I disable hibernation support on some systems.
Power management on the PC has always been hit and miss. Laptops seem to fair better because they pretty much have to work because that's how the customers are accustomed to using them.
Personally I'm a shut down kind of guy. I let my monitors go to sleep (big old CRTs), but that's it. I don't have the machine on when I'm sleeping or not around to use it. Thankfully XP boots up pretty quick if you don't have any goofy controllers to initialize.
Well, it may be more that people just don't understand pagerank. Pagerank has a *very small* overall impact on search results. If competition is tight, then this difference might be important, but in many cases it simply is not. What is important is what's always been important, content and code.
The mystery surrounding pagerank is a big part of why people overestimate it. It's hard to say exactly how much of an impact it has, and exactly how it is calculated. How google determines if a site is "linking" to your site is just as mysterious. While Search Engine B shows thousands of pages from hundreds of sites linking to your page, Google might show 5. If you want to use Google and want to know who is linking to you, then it's better to do a search for your URL or domain name.
You're right though about Adsense being a major problem. I just don't believe that pagerank has much to do with it. Adsense is a major boon to content spammers, the new breed of which is much worse than the old search engine spammers from 10 years ago. What's frustrating is that Google supposedly has Real People(tm) monitoring Adsense and Adwords watching for abuse. Why is it then that in almost any search I do, I'm spotting dozens and sometimes hundreds of obvious abusers? Maybe if Google added humans to their teams as quickly as they add cheap PC servers, we could see some real change.
Personally I like the idea of Adsense. I use Adsense legitimately on one of my sites and it pays and works well. It's much nicer than the old banner exchange advertising programs, and simpler than custom advertising. Something just has to be done about these content whores. There's one particular Adsense forum that I stop by from time to time, and the things that a lot of people are trying to accomplish are no different in principal from email or any other kind of spammers.
I'm glad this came up because I was wondering why there haven't been any new versions of mmcache.
I still use it because it's rock solid reliable and the performance is still fantastic. I'm now tempted to try out eAccelerator, but my gut tells me that any performance improvements would be fairly small. Anyhow, I'm adding it to the bottom of my "stuff to try" list.
In some applications that may be true, but overall accelerators do make a huge difference. I'm seeing over 2-3 times faster page generation times for most standard web applications (forums, CMS) using Turck mmcache (forced into memory only). No side effects that I've ever noticed after a couple years of running it. Taking advantage of MySQL's (4.1+) query cache also helps quite a bit.
It's a substantial difference, with heavy php+database pages like forum indexes generating in 0.3 to 0.5 seconds vs. 2 - 3 seconds under moderate load. The PHP cache accounts for a majority of the difference. Start piling on users and it becomes quite critical to server load and overall user experience.
I've heard a lot of arguments about why software piracy statistics are bogus, but none as *dumb* as saying that companies using software illegally will be more productive because of the software, thus contribute more to the economy.
Despite the fact that it represents some pretty screwed up values, it just doesn't make much sense. If a company can experience growth related directly to the stealing of software, then they could have purchased the software, and they still should have grown. Buying software is just a cost of doing business, and shouldn't be having that much of an impact on the bottom line all by itself. Perhaps we should all just start bending the rules and pirate and steal our expenses away because hey, we're hiring more employees, we're paying our investors, and we're making more profit, which is good for everybody, right? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me.
When it comes piracy on the private, home use level, I think that the piracy numbers they always come out with are ridiculous. Just because the software is installed and being used does not mean that a sale was lost. This isn't a defense of piracy, just a reiteration of distinction between piracy and theft. They are not the same thing. But if we decided to treat them as the same thing for the purpose of creating an accurate yet misleading argument, then oh no, Software Company X is out a gazillion billion dollars!
I'm not sure why they specifically picked IE6. It certainly wasn't the first version of IE that had terrible security problems.
I might have just picked Internet Explorer in general. My first experience with IE was IE3, which in my opinion was worse than any subsequent version by a long shot, especially when compared to Netscape 3. IE4 was pretty good from the user perspective, and nicer to run than Netscape/Communicator 4 IMO. With "IE integration" being all the rage back then I eventually gave in and switched all my users to IE4, and it was ok at the time...I didn't suffer from installation issues mentioned. Both IE5 and 6 are just as usable, but don't really bring anything new to the table except exploits galore. I'm pretty darn thankful for Firefox these days. There was sort of a gap there for a while where you either used IE (on windows) or you paid for a browser that worked. Other alternatives were slow and/or didn't want to play rendering games (spite?).
In regards to AOL I'd definately list it as one of the worst tech products. I don't know how many people I switched from AOL to regular ISPs in the 90s. Most people didn't know that they could reach the same damn internet with a cheaper, faster, local service, and would install AOL because "hey, here's a disk I got from a magazine/the mailbox/walmart/the sidewalk" and "9000 free minutes sounds good to me!" Then they got to find out just how much fun it can be to try to remove AOL from a machine, and how much more fun it can be to get AOL to stop sucking money from your checking account even though you cancelled your service (or so you thought). Even today AOL software continues to funk up machines and their proxy servers continue to piss off web admins and users alike. Their service isn't really beneficial to the large portion of their customers, who have access to alternative services for less money and less hassle. The only knowledge that a "newbie" gets from an experience with AOL is, "man, that sucked."
Been using Exabyte VXA-1 and VXA-2 drives/autoloaders/media for many years with great success. Very nice for quick recovery of small file sets. Half the hardware price of LTO. Yeah you get what you pay for, but if it works it works, and for me thus far it's worked.
No, I definately meant the christian science part as a troll.
I do find it amusing though that an article about the difficulties communicating via email (or any fast written medium) would make the Slashdot main page in 2006.
Glad to see christian science is keeping up with the times - I found this article very useful. Do you think that it also applies to world wide web chat rooms like Slashdot?:):->
What we are witnessing is the good-life effect. We are a couple generations out from the last "good" war, where the enemy was clearly the enemy and people were willing to risk their lives to defend what is right. Out of struggle comes the realization that our ideals are more than just words.
Every single kid in our public education system today learns about the costs and importance of freedom, but without any real life experiences to back them up, these teachings are easy to take for granted. We have become a weak society where human life and happiness is held in the highest regard - not because we have empathy for our fellow man, but because we are worried about ourselves. This is a society in which we work hard to produce unnecessary goods to sell to people who are working hard to produce unnecessary goods that we greatly desire and gladly buy with the money earned from producing unnecessary goods. It's a nice, safe, happy little circle. How many of us can even imagine that we can lose everything we own and still remain alive much less having a productive and "happy" life?
We have it so easy that the individual no longer has to care, and we become a society of individuals with very weak bonds to one-another, rambling on and on in some Internet chat room (which is what the media seems to call anything online these days, have you noticed that?). And just being able to see this happening doesn't make it any easier for the self-proclaimed "enlightened individual" to not play along.... because it's just easier, and they have new products just for you over there in the organics and "shit made from recycled shit" section of our community co-op mega-superstore franchise.
Compassion and empathy are still in us, it just takes something really bad to bring them out. A hurricane? Ok I'll send my fifty bucks. A building blew up? Ok I'll send my pint of blood. But my life isn't going to change unless something bad happens directly to me, my immediate family, or maybe within a 50 mile radius. I like things just the way they are, and I want tomorrow to be exactly the same. Will I sacrifice a few small freedoms for this? Sure, I'm not doing anything wrong. Just take care of me so that I can go to work in box, stop at Walmart on the way home for a new DVD, and fall asleep on my $1000 sofa in front of my $8,000 entertainment center where I watch movies about heroic people dying for the freedoms I just voted away.
Ever get the feeling that we have nothing to live for? Our children yes, but what do they have to live for? Maybe a better question is: what do they have to *die* for? What does it mean to be a man today? Paying child support apparently. What does it mean to be a woman? Trying to get the man to pay child support. Did you know that there are four one-hour long court shows on television on the same network all in a row from 12PM to 4PM five days a week here? "He owes me money." "She's a bitch and don't deserve it." I'm never taking another sick day. How depressing.
We will continue down this path to inevitable corruption and inner-dishonesty until something bad enough happens that the inner-human is forced to the surface. Not something so bad that it takes five years before they make a made-for-TV movie about it, but something along the lines of a lunatic army rolling through Europe.
At any rate, it's a much deeper issue than simple government-funded education. The root of the issue is a complete lack of cause other than the teachings of history, which are boring.:)
Wow, I just read what I wrote...pretty pessimistic. I better go home and re-play Call of Duty to restore my patriotism. Horf.
I can't even write on paper anymore, honestly. It's just too slow. My hand cramps up, I skip letters in words and frequently skip words completely. It's a big mess. I have to slow down and really pay attention just to write a check.
What's really embarassing is that I realize now how dependent I am on being able to modify my words as I'm writing them...I blurt out a whole bunch of sentences and then go back and try to edit them to make them flow.
What's really strange is that I can't *spell* as well on paper as I can when I type, regardless of whether a spell checker is available.
I will *draw* ideas out on paper, however. This is still something that the computer just can't help with. Yeah it can be made to do all sorts of tricks, but sketching out structures and relationships is just better done on paper. I also like to print code and mark up edits and problems with pen. I can't imagine writing out actual code by hand though...maybe a little shorthand code just to get the idea flowing, but then it's back to the machine for me.
(I will admit that I write poetry on paper because it feels better and is a slow process. I hope that admitting this doesn't jeapordize my slashdot membership... )
Yeah that's what bugs me the most. Remember 10 years ago or so when they had that huge advertsing campaign to push the idea that they supported products made in the US? Well, there weren't any more US made items in the store then than there are now, which is and was very, very little (from my personal observations then and now. In fact, the next time you're in there, just start looking at labels, it's....amusing.). But they got that idea into people's heads, and continue to pump this patriotic message in their advertisements.
Walmart has the power to set prices, and they do. Many American companies can't compete with goods coming in from places like China, and thus can't get their items into the Walmart stores. All they while Walmart is telling us that they're a great, patriotic American corporation with strong community ties just trying to help the average working man save a few bucks.
Thanks for looking out for me, but I think I'll spend the extra 15 cents for a can of green beans at my local grocery store. What really gets me is that in a smaller area like the one I live in, the big box stores are now the *only* sources for certain items. Luckily I only find myself having to shop there a few times a year.
Do I sympathize with Walmart because the Wikipedia page appears negatively biased? About as much as I sympathize with a grown man crying over a hang nail.
In my experience, the people in Windows server product newsgroups are often very friendly because they're tied together by a feeling of "man, this really does suck sometimes." My time in such groups was probably the most positive of any forum about any topic.
Yeah, anybody with MVP in their sig is more likely to be snobby, but they're pretty easy to put in their place.
Recall some of the earlier MySQL documentation that said, basically, "if you need the database to enforce referential integrity, your application is crap so you need to fix your application or use another database..."
Ha, I remember that line out of the docs. I actually chose a different database at that time based on that one comment. While those comments were *partially* true, I found the whole thing very arrogant and short sighted.
I stopped buying Thinkpads when the Lenovo thing happened. It's not racism, and it's not that I think the quality will be less. It's simply that I don't feel like supporting a Chinese-owned company because I don't support the Chinese government. Sure, I know that it's nearly impossible to buy anything that doesn't have some if not most components manufactured in China, but this one is a no-brainer for me.
At this time I buy almost all of my machines, laptops and workstations, from Systemax (well, from a Systemax vendor). They're all very well priced and manufactured in the US. Plus I can open them up and recognize all the components, and everything is replacable with stock parts. Sure, they don't use the hottest hardware, but for business class machines they've been great to me for the past 7 or so years (I've used about 50 machines from them in total...and the only ones that gave me grief had MSI 6330 motherboards, which somebody should have started a class action over). I will say that I prefered Thinkpads over Systemax laptops because Thinkpads are much more rugged (aside from having horrible hard drives). On the other hand, it's a lot easier to get all the drivers for an aging Systemax laptop than an older IBM laptop because, again, all stock components...no funny business.
A few years ago I sent back an IBM server because it was manufactured in Mexico. Actually, it arrived damaged and I was going to exchange it when I noticed its origin, at which point I just asked for my money back. This is a completely different scenario than the Lenovo one, as I simply don't think that it's necessary for IBM to be taking advantage of cheap labor to put together machines and then charging name-brand inflated prices. I ended up ordering a custom server using a really nice Intel chasis put together by a California company and paid a little less for higher specs, with warranty and all.
Except that decoys are designed to fool the threat into striking the decoy and not the intended target.
This involves targeting the threat and destroying it actively.
Anyhow, I wonder how accurate the system is in determining what constitutes a threat? From the owners manual: "Approach your new Cybertank 2000 slowly. Allow Cybertank 2000 to become comfortable with your presence. Do not make any sudden movements near Cybertank 2000. Do not make Cybertank 2000 angry. If Cybertank 2000 calls its defense system a forcefield, do not be argumentative."
Usually working in a team means learning to take advantage of the strengths and weaknesses of each team member. That's as much part of the learning experience as the project itself. Each team member doing what they are worst at wouldn't make much sense and would probably result in a low score for the entire team (just like it would out here in real life).
"Despite what Microsoft says about minimal impact, it makes it much harder to use an application that has a lot of ActiveX or Applets. Each time you load a page with a control, you have to activate it. So if the user goes to PageA with a control and activates it, then goes to PageB with a control and activates that one, if they then go back to PageA again then have to activate it again," said the source, who requested anonymity.
Well, there are dangers in not keeping the software up to date, even if the software is working fine for you today. When you start getting two or more major versions behind, it becomes much trickier to upgrade the product. This is especially true of accounting systems, where major upgrades almost *always* seem to introduce data glitches that need to be hashed out. Doing this over time is easier than trying to do multiple upgrades all at once, and expecting the result to actually work.
Eventually, you *will* want to upgrade.
- A new featureset will be introduced that the company will want to implement. - A bug will surface (probably in a less frequently used feature) and the vendor won't want to support you. - Your hardware and operating system requirements will change and the software will not function on the new systems. - The software will stop interoperating with some other software package that was upgraded for the reasons above, and so on.
The mentality of "it's fine just the way it is, this is all we need" would be great if that's the way the business world worked. Hell, sometimes it's tempting to just get out the paper and pencils and to hell with computers.
I do agree with most sentiments in this discussion though. Upgrades are a pain. Upgrades do often weaken the features that you liked so much about the software to start with. Etc.
The software package I hate the most when it comes to upgrades is a pretty minor piece of software: UPS Worldship. I swear they come out with a brand new major revision of this software twice a year, and it's always pretty close to being the exact same piece of software it's always been. So why upgrade? If you don't, UPS starts hawking at you to upgrade, and eventually the software just won't work. It seems to me that any service changes could be handled dynamically without having to actually *upgrade* the software itself. Anyhow, long story short, I let it go until it was three versions old and UPS forced me to upgrade, at which point it was extremely difficult to migrate the old data to the new system.
If a person or company is running a server on the net, they are doing so to provide services and information to users/customers. Using a that server for any other purpose than what is clearly intended is not good form, and is probably a violation of ISP policy. Therefore, while the cops aren't going to show up at your door for scanning system, your ISP might pull your plug.
This assignment is very poorly thought out. Students could learn just as much from a few different servers running on the university network.
Your phone would have to connect to transmit anything. I've actually had this problem on more than one occasion, although it was a flaw in my own programming, not the phone's! There's nothing more embarassing than forgetting to lock your phone and having it speed dial somebody while in your pocket. Especially when you're in your car singing along to the radio.
I'm not sure if there are any IT standards for hospitals, but there should be. I can see PCs becoming infected and causing some *PC* problems, but what are they doing on the same network as critical services? Being able to open an operating room door or page a doctor is pretty important stuff IMO.
This would have been an extremely minor problem had things been designed with this (common!) scenario in mind, and it wouldn't have cost a zillion dollars more. This would have also been an extremely minor problem (if a problem at all) had the hospital been enforcing a very simple security policy including anti-virus software.
Was the hospital negligent? Considering that people are entrusting their health care to the hospital and that there were simple measures that could have prevented something like this from occuring: yes. Should the kid who caused the problem get smacked around too? Yes, definately, complete with no computer access as part of his parole conditions. Should the spyware/adware/getrichwithoutgettingup companies share some of the blame? They all should have been wiped off the face of the planet years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't say that your situation is unique, but you happen to be on the lucky side of the fence.
I've never had more than a 50% success rate with hibernation or standby on Windows PCs. The most frequent problem is that the machine will take a nap quite easily at the touch of a button, but it won't wake up without physically powering the machine off and back on, thus losing everything the user had going.
This problem coupled with Microsoft's brilliant keyboard design notion of putting the sleep button right next to the calculator button has made it necessary that I disable hibernation support on some systems.
Power management on the PC has always been hit and miss. Laptops seem to fair better because they pretty much have to work because that's how the customers are accustomed to using them.
Personally I'm a shut down kind of guy. I let my monitors go to sleep (big old CRTs), but that's it. I don't have the machine on when I'm sleeping or not around to use it. Thankfully XP boots up pretty quick if you don't have any goofy controllers to initialize.
I use it because I've been using it for years without a hitch. I'm still running PHP 4. No need to fix what isn't broken.
Assuming the development on eAccelerator is on the right track, I'm sure I will be using it at some point down the road.
Well, it may be more that people just don't understand pagerank. Pagerank has a *very small* overall impact on search results. If competition is tight, then this difference might be important, but in many cases it simply is not. What is important is what's always been important, content and code.
The mystery surrounding pagerank is a big part of why people overestimate it. It's hard to say exactly how much of an impact it has, and exactly how it is calculated. How google determines if a site is "linking" to your site is just as mysterious. While Search Engine B shows thousands of pages from hundreds of sites linking to your page, Google might show 5. If you want to use Google and want to know who is linking to you, then it's better to do a search for your URL or domain name.
You're right though about Adsense being a major problem. I just don't believe that pagerank has much to do with it. Adsense is a major boon to content spammers, the new breed of which is much worse than the old search engine spammers from 10 years ago. What's frustrating is that Google supposedly has Real People(tm) monitoring Adsense and Adwords watching for abuse. Why is it then that in almost any search I do, I'm spotting dozens and sometimes hundreds of obvious abusers? Maybe if Google added humans to their teams as quickly as they add cheap PC servers, we could see some real change.
Personally I like the idea of Adsense. I use Adsense legitimately on one of my sites and it pays and works well. It's much nicer than the old banner exchange advertising programs, and simpler than custom advertising. Something just has to be done about these content whores. There's one particular Adsense forum that I stop by from time to time, and the things that a lot of people are trying to accomplish are no different in principal from email or any other kind of spammers.
I'm glad this came up because I was wondering why there haven't been any new versions of mmcache.
I still use it because it's rock solid reliable and the performance is still fantastic. I'm now tempted to try out eAccelerator, but my gut tells me that any performance improvements would be fairly small. Anyhow, I'm adding it to the bottom of my "stuff to try" list.
In some applications that may be true, but overall accelerators do make a huge difference. I'm seeing over 2-3 times faster page generation times for most standard web applications (forums, CMS) using Turck mmcache (forced into memory only). No side effects that I've ever noticed after a couple years of running it. Taking advantage of MySQL's (4.1+) query cache also helps quite a bit.
It's a substantial difference, with heavy php+database pages like forum indexes generating in 0.3 to 0.5 seconds vs. 2 - 3 seconds under moderate load. The PHP cache accounts for a majority of the difference. Start piling on users and it becomes quite critical to server load and overall user experience.
I've heard a lot of arguments about why software piracy statistics are bogus, but none as *dumb* as saying that companies using software illegally will be more productive because of the software, thus contribute more to the economy.
Despite the fact that it represents some pretty screwed up values, it just doesn't make much sense. If a company can experience growth related directly to the stealing of software, then they could have purchased the software, and they still should have grown. Buying software is just a cost of doing business, and shouldn't be having that much of an impact on the bottom line all by itself. Perhaps we should all just start bending the rules and pirate and steal our expenses away because hey, we're hiring more employees, we're paying our investors, and we're making more profit, which is good for everybody, right? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me.
When it comes piracy on the private, home use level, I think that the piracy numbers they always come out with are ridiculous. Just because the software is installed and being used does not mean that a sale was lost. This isn't a defense of piracy, just a reiteration of distinction between piracy and theft. They are not the same thing. But if we decided to treat them as the same thing for the purpose of creating an accurate yet misleading argument, then oh no, Software Company X is out a gazillion billion dollars!
I'm not sure why they specifically picked IE6. It certainly wasn't the first version of IE that had terrible security problems.
I might have just picked Internet Explorer in general. My first experience with IE was IE3, which in my opinion was worse than any subsequent version by a long shot, especially when compared to Netscape 3. IE4 was pretty good from the user perspective, and nicer to run than Netscape/Communicator 4 IMO. With "IE integration" being all the rage back then I eventually gave in and switched all my users to IE4, and it was ok at the time...I didn't suffer from installation issues mentioned. Both IE5 and 6 are just as usable, but don't really bring anything new to the table except exploits galore. I'm pretty darn thankful for Firefox these days. There was sort of a gap there for a while where you either used IE (on windows) or you paid for a browser that worked. Other alternatives were slow and/or didn't want to play rendering games (spite?).
In regards to AOL I'd definately list it as one of the worst tech products. I don't know how many people I switched from AOL to regular ISPs in the 90s. Most people didn't know that they could reach the same damn internet with a cheaper, faster, local service, and would install AOL because "hey, here's a disk I got from a magazine/the mailbox/walmart/the sidewalk" and "9000 free minutes sounds good to me!" Then they got to find out just how much fun it can be to try to remove AOL from a machine, and how much more fun it can be to get AOL to stop sucking money from your checking account even though you cancelled your service (or so you thought). Even today AOL software continues to funk up machines and their proxy servers continue to piss off web admins and users alike. Their service isn't really beneficial to the large portion of their customers, who have access to alternative services for less money and less hassle. The only knowledge that a "newbie" gets from an experience with AOL is, "man, that sucked."
Been using Exabyte VXA-1 and VXA-2 drives/autoloaders/media for many years with great success. Very nice for quick recovery of small file sets. Half the hardware price of LTO. Yeah you get what you pay for, but if it works it works, and for me thus far it's worked.
I bought my DVD burner that supports DL last year for $30. Piece of junk I'm sure, but it works. Burners are as disposable as printers anymore.
What main drag when it comes to DL is the media cost, not finding a burner.
No, I definately meant the christian science part as a troll.
I do find it amusing though that an article about the difficulties communicating via email (or any fast written medium) would make the Slashdot main page in 2006.
wElCoMe bAcK tO 1995.
:) :->
Glad to see christian science is keeping up with the times - I found this article very useful. Do you think that it also applies to world wide web chat rooms like Slashdot?
What we are witnessing is the good-life effect. We are a couple generations out from the last "good" war, where the enemy was clearly the enemy and people were willing to risk their lives to defend what is right. Out of struggle comes the realization that our ideals are more than just words.
:)
Every single kid in our public education system today learns about the costs and importance of freedom, but without any real life experiences to back them up, these teachings are easy to take for granted. We have become a weak society where human life and happiness is held in the highest regard - not because we have empathy for our fellow man, but because we are worried about ourselves. This is a society in which we work hard to produce unnecessary goods to sell to people who are working hard to produce unnecessary goods that we greatly desire and gladly buy with the money earned from producing unnecessary goods. It's a nice, safe, happy little circle. How many of us can even imagine that we can lose everything we own and still remain alive much less having a productive and "happy" life?
We have it so easy that the individual no longer has to care, and we become a society of individuals with very weak bonds to one-another, rambling on and on in some Internet chat room (which is what the media seems to call anything online these days, have you noticed that?). And just being able to see this happening doesn't make it any easier for the self-proclaimed "enlightened individual" to not play along.... because it's just easier, and they have new products just for you over there in the organics and "shit made from recycled shit" section of our community co-op mega-superstore franchise.
Compassion and empathy are still in us, it just takes something really bad to bring them out. A hurricane? Ok I'll send my fifty bucks. A building blew up? Ok I'll send my pint of blood. But my life isn't going to change unless something bad happens directly to me, my immediate family, or maybe within a 50 mile radius. I like things just the way they are, and I want tomorrow to be exactly the same. Will I sacrifice a few small freedoms for this? Sure, I'm not doing anything wrong. Just take care of me so that I can go to work in box, stop at Walmart on the way home for a new DVD, and fall asleep on my $1000 sofa in front of my $8,000 entertainment center where I watch movies about heroic people dying for the freedoms I just voted away.
Ever get the feeling that we have nothing to live for? Our children yes, but what do they have to live for? Maybe a better question is: what do they have to *die* for? What does it mean to be a man today? Paying child support apparently. What does it mean to be a woman? Trying to get the man to pay child support. Did you know that there are four one-hour long court shows on television on the same network all in a row from 12PM to 4PM five days a week here? "He owes me money." "She's a bitch and don't deserve it." I'm never taking another sick day. How depressing.
We will continue down this path to inevitable corruption and inner-dishonesty until something bad enough happens that the inner-human is forced to the surface. Not something so bad that it takes five years before they make a made-for-TV movie about it, but something along the lines of a lunatic army rolling through Europe.
At any rate, it's a much deeper issue than simple government-funded education. The root of the issue is a complete lack of cause other than the teachings of history, which are boring.
Wow, I just read what I wrote...pretty pessimistic. I better go home and re-play Call of Duty to restore my patriotism. Horf.
I can't even write on paper anymore, honestly. It's just too slow. My hand cramps up, I skip letters in words and frequently skip words completely. It's a big mess. I have to slow down and really pay attention just to write a check.
What's really embarassing is that I realize now how dependent I am on being able to modify my words as I'm writing them...I blurt out a whole bunch of sentences and then go back and try to edit them to make them flow.
What's really strange is that I can't *spell* as well on paper as I can when I type, regardless of whether a spell checker is available.
I will *draw* ideas out on paper, however. This is still something that the computer just can't help with. Yeah it can be made to do all sorts of tricks, but sketching out structures and relationships is just better done on paper. I also like to print code and mark up edits and problems with pen. I can't imagine writing out actual code by hand though...maybe a little shorthand code just to get the idea flowing, but then it's back to the machine for me.
(I will admit that I write poetry on paper because it feels better and is a slow process. I hope that admitting this doesn't jeapordize my slashdot membership... )
Yeah that's what bugs me the most. Remember 10 years ago or so when they had that huge advertsing campaign to push the idea that they supported products made in the US? Well, there weren't any more US made items in the store then than there are now, which is and was very, very little (from my personal observations then and now. In fact, the next time you're in there, just start looking at labels, it's....amusing.). But they got that idea into people's heads, and continue to pump this patriotic message in their advertisements.
Walmart has the power to set prices, and they do. Many American companies can't compete with goods coming in from places like China, and thus can't get their items into the Walmart stores. All they while Walmart is telling us that they're a great, patriotic American corporation with strong community ties just trying to help the average working man save a few bucks.
Thanks for looking out for me, but I think I'll spend the extra 15 cents for a can of green beans at my local grocery store. What really gets me is that in a smaller area like the one I live in, the big box stores are now the *only* sources for certain items. Luckily I only find myself having to shop there a few times a year.
Do I sympathize with Walmart because the Wikipedia page appears negatively biased? About as much as I sympathize with a grown man crying over a hang nail.
In my experience, the people in Windows server product newsgroups are often very friendly because they're tied together by a feeling of "man, this really does suck sometimes." My time in such groups was probably the most positive of any forum about any topic.
Yeah, anybody with MVP in their sig is more likely to be snobby, but they're pretty easy to put in their place.
Recall some of the earlier MySQL documentation that said, basically, "if you need the database to enforce referential integrity, your application is crap so you need to fix your application or use another database..."
Ha, I remember that line out of the docs. I actually chose a different database at that time based on that one comment. While those comments were *partially* true, I found the whole thing very arrogant and short sighted.
I stopped buying Thinkpads when the Lenovo thing happened. It's not racism, and it's not that I think the quality will be less. It's simply that I don't feel like supporting a Chinese-owned company because I don't support the Chinese government. Sure, I know that it's nearly impossible to buy anything that doesn't have some if not most components manufactured in China, but this one is a no-brainer for me.
At this time I buy almost all of my machines, laptops and workstations, from Systemax (well, from a Systemax vendor). They're all very well priced and manufactured in the US. Plus I can open them up and recognize all the components, and everything is replacable with stock parts. Sure, they don't use the hottest hardware, but for business class machines they've been great to me for the past 7 or so years (I've used about 50 machines from them in total...and the only ones that gave me grief had MSI 6330 motherboards, which somebody should have started a class action over). I will say that I prefered Thinkpads over Systemax laptops because Thinkpads are much more rugged (aside from having horrible hard drives). On the other hand, it's a lot easier to get all the drivers for an aging Systemax laptop than an older IBM laptop because, again, all stock components...no funny business.
A few years ago I sent back an IBM server because it was manufactured in Mexico. Actually, it arrived damaged and I was going to exchange it when I noticed its origin, at which point I just asked for my money back. This is a completely different scenario than the Lenovo one, as I simply don't think that it's necessary for IBM to be taking advantage of cheap labor to put together machines and then charging name-brand inflated prices. I ended up ordering a custom server using a really nice Intel chasis put together by a California company and paid a little less for higher specs, with warranty and all.
Except that decoys are designed to fool the threat into striking the decoy and not the intended target.
This involves targeting the threat and destroying it actively.
Anyhow, I wonder how accurate the system is in determining what constitutes a threat? From the owners manual: "Approach your new Cybertank 2000 slowly. Allow Cybertank 2000 to become comfortable with your presence. Do not make any sudden movements near Cybertank 2000. Do not make Cybertank 2000 angry. If Cybertank 2000 calls its defense system a forcefield, do not be argumentative."
Usually working in a team means learning to take advantage of the strengths and weaknesses of each team member. That's as much part of the learning experience as the project itself. Each team member doing what they are worst at wouldn't make much sense and would probably result in a low score for the entire team (just like it would out here in real life).
From the very next paragraph in TFA:
"Despite what Microsoft says about minimal impact, it makes it much harder to use an application that has a lot of ActiveX or Applets. Each time you load a page with a control, you have to activate it. So if the user goes to PageA with a control and activates it, then goes to PageB with a control and activates that one, if they then go back to PageA again then have to activate it again," said the source, who requested anonymity.
Well, there are dangers in not keeping the software up to date, even if the software is working fine for you today. When you start getting two or more major versions behind, it becomes much trickier to upgrade the product. This is especially true of accounting systems, where major upgrades almost *always* seem to introduce data glitches that need to be hashed out. Doing this over time is easier than trying to do multiple upgrades all at once, and expecting the result to actually work.
Eventually, you *will* want to upgrade.
- A new featureset will be introduced that the company will want to implement.
- A bug will surface (probably in a less frequently used feature) and the vendor won't want to support you.
- Your hardware and operating system requirements will change and the software will not function on the new systems.
- The software will stop interoperating with some other software package that was upgraded for the reasons above, and so on.
The mentality of "it's fine just the way it is, this is all we need" would be great if that's the way the business world worked. Hell, sometimes it's tempting to just get out the paper and pencils and to hell with computers.
I do agree with most sentiments in this discussion though. Upgrades are a pain. Upgrades do often weaken the features that you liked so much about the software to start with. Etc.
The software package I hate the most when it comes to upgrades is a pretty minor piece of software: UPS Worldship. I swear they come out with a brand new major revision of this software twice a year, and it's always pretty close to being the exact same piece of software it's always been. So why upgrade? If you don't, UPS starts hawking at you to upgrade, and eventually the software just won't work. It seems to me that any service changes could be handled dynamically without having to actually *upgrade* the software itself. Anyhow, long story short, I let it go until it was three versions old and UPS forced me to upgrade, at which point it was extremely difficult to migrate the old data to the new system.
Well, it's not illegal, but:
If a person or company is running a server on the net, they are doing so to provide services and information to users/customers. Using a that server for any other purpose than what is clearly intended is not good form, and is probably a violation of ISP policy. Therefore, while the cops aren't going to show up at your door for scanning system, your ISP might pull your plug.
This assignment is very poorly thought out. Students could learn just as much from a few different servers running on the university network.
It will probably just monitor SPL.
Your phone would have to connect to transmit anything. I've actually had this problem on more than one occasion, although it was a flaw in my own programming, not the phone's! There's nothing more embarassing than forgetting to lock your phone and having it speed dial somebody while in your pocket. Especially when you're in your car singing along to the radio.
Agreed. With so much manufacturing going on in China, why would they decide to block Internet-based companies from doing business there?
I was just going to say that!
I'm not sure if there are any IT standards for hospitals, but there should be. I can see PCs becoming infected and causing some *PC* problems, but what are they doing on the same network as critical services? Being able to open an operating room door or page a doctor is pretty important stuff IMO.
This would have been an extremely minor problem had things been designed with this (common!) scenario in mind, and it wouldn't have cost a zillion dollars more. This would have also been an extremely minor problem (if a problem at all) had the hospital been enforcing a very simple security policy including anti-virus software.
Was the hospital negligent? Considering that people are entrusting their health care to the hospital and that there were simple measures that could have prevented something like this from occuring: yes. Should the kid who caused the problem get smacked around too? Yes, definately, complete with no computer access as part of his parole conditions. Should the spyware/adware/getrichwithoutgettingup companies share some of the blame? They all should have been wiped off the face of the planet years ago.