Maybe this is a sign that their QA is starting to slip?
It wouldn't surprise me (but the problem may go well beyond Intel). Of the three motherboards that have ever failed on me over 30+ years, two were Intel (a D101GGC and a DG43NB). Neither of them were ever run from crap PSUs, and both had blown capacitors. Even weirder, the caps were all from respected capacitor firms (Nippon Chemi-Con on the DG43NB and Matsushita on the D101GGC). I guess it's a Good Thing that Intel is exiting the motherboard business.
The third board that failed was an Abit KT7-RAID... one of the early infamous examples of capacitor plague.
IMO, they were the best laptop keyboards around - unfortunately, someone thought that "chiclet keyboards with flat tops are kewl!" and now all of the recent laptops I've seen for sale have keyboards that SUCK. Don't even get me started on the incredible disappearing TrackPoint.
The flat keytop nonsense has spread to desktop keyboards as well. HELLO?! Does anyone actually TEST these things to see if they're actually useful for typing?
If only Creative wouldn't have shit in their customers laps when Vista rolled around and actually offered proper drivers for the thing.
That sounds awfully familiar. I have an E-MU 0404 USB audio interface - the sound is absolutely wonderful, but they never got beyond a poorly functioning beta driver for Windows 7, so I'm stuck with XP, or getting a different interface such as a Focusrite. The ASUS cards seem like they'd be nice, but I don't want baked-in equalization that I can't change.
Recent Linux kernels seem to support the box, but no Linux audio player can manage my music library as well as Foobar2000, and WINE won't let me go to 24-bit 96 kHz.
Just because I state a non-popular opinion, instead of debate, I get modded to hell. It looks like all of the cool kids are attacking Oracle these days, so anything other than full retard anit-Oracle is acceptable.
When you resort to ad hominem attacks ("freetards," "full retard," etc.), you've already lost the debate.
But let's look at Oracle's track record. Their handling of OpenSolaris leaves a lot to be desired, to say the least. I could go on, but I guess you don't want to hear anything from "freetards."
It works beautifully on an XP desktop system, and recent Linux kernels seem to support it at least for playback. On Linux, the Clementine audio player works well, but I like Foobar2000 better. Unfortunately, Foobar2000 doesn't work in Linux except under Wine, and Wine doesn't work all that well with the 0404 USB.
I tried running XP under VirtualBox with the 0404 USB passed through, but that just doesn't work - virtualization and timing-critical hardware are a bad mix. I hate the idea that I'd have to dedicate a box to running XP just for audio purposes and nothing else, but that might be what happens unless I can find an audio player that manages my music collection as well as Foobar2000. As it is, I do anything important (email, online banking, etc.) from Linux.
At any rate, I have no compelling reason to go to Windows 7 let alone Windows 8. On my last go-around with Windows 8 CP, I hated it - they're making the same mistake, albeit in a different direction, that the Unity and GNOME 3 developers are making. A tablet UI is great for a tablet, not for a desktop.
As for Creative, I learned my lesson the hard way - don't buy their gear.
The funny thing about this is that you occasionally see the Pre-Columbia-Pictures Sony in some products
Another example, surprisingly enough, is an audio recorder, the PCM-M10. Uncharacteristically for Sony, it accepts MicroSDHC cards as well as yet another variant of the Memory Stick. If I didn't already have an Olympus recorder that does all I need, I might consider it... except that I just can't bring myself to buy a Sony product.
But, just when I thought that Sony might have picked up some Clue, along comes the PS Vita that doesn't even use Memory Stick, instead using a new flash memory format used by nothing else. DIAF, Sony.
Well, NoScript put a big yellow box at the top of this article, so at least I didn't have to watch it. Did the video auto-play, too? There are few things on the web that I hate more than auto-playing commercials.
NoScript makes the web bearable these days, but it's a crying shame that it's necessary.
But, back to Slashdot, it seems to me like there's been an awful lot of shark-jumping since Taco left. I'm not going to completely bail just yet, but I'm finding myself spending less and less time here. It was great while it lasted!
One thing to note, though, is that Linode will sometimes hand out extras - and if it's disk space or RAM, you'll need to reboot to take advantage of it.:)
I've been a happy customer since 2003 - Linode was literally a day old (at least for public availability) when I first got a VPS from them. Over the years, CPU, RAM, disk capacity, and data transfer have steadily increased, for no extra charge, and the service has been rock-solid.
I had an '82 RX-7 about 20 years ago (damn, that long ago?!). On the plus side, it was damn fun to drive, the engine was silky smooth, and the car had beautiful styling. On the minus side, the E-Z-Flood manual choke was very touchy in cold weather, spark plugs and other mundane parts were ridiculously expensive, and it was expensive to insure.
The crowning irony: my 2010 Honda Fit has noticeably faster 0-60 and slightly faster quarter-mile times, outcorners the RX-7, and gets about 75% better fuel economy, and is cheaper to insure and seats four to boot. Both the Fit and the RX-7 had 5-speed manual transmissions; the Fit isn't so peppy with a slushbox.
In recent months, I've noticed that Google Maps satellite view has been pretty hideous in Firefox. Satellite view tiles get updated on a haphazard basis with long delays, and that wasn't the case beforehand. It's just as much a problem on fast machines as it is on slow ones. Recently, I decided to fire up Chrome, and, lo and behold, the satellite views work quite nicely.
It makes me wonder whether it's Firefox's fault, or if Google Maps has been tweaked to work better in Chrome, or perhaps both.
In my tests I found that anything short of a 3GHz P4 with HT is frankly unusable, with a new tab spiking the CPU to 100% and taking control away from the user for up to a minute, more like 3 minutes if they launch even an SD video. That is simply unacceptable, and that is with NO extensions but ABP and ForecastFox, the same as loaded on the Dragon. On the lowest machine i have, which is a 1.8GHz Sempron with 1.5Gb of RAM that I use as a nettop in the shop I found Firefox to be so sluggish it was just pathetic, the exact same machine with Dragon is a fine little web surfer.
Are you sure there isn't something else wrong (perhaps a resource-hogging antivirus package, or a badly-fragmented hard drive)? I know this is just another anecdote, but I'm writing this from a system that's about identical to your low-end box (1.8 GHz Sempron and 1.5 GB RAM, onboard NVidia 6100, XP Home SP3), and FF 6.0.2 is quite peppy and responsive. A new blank tab comes up instantly, and a new tab with a page doesn't take any longer to load than if I didn't open the tab. Granted, I don't keep 100 tabs open, but I often have 8-10 up. As for extensions, I have NoScript, PrefBar, and DownThemAll installed. At the moment, I have Thunderbird, GVim, PuTTY, OpenVPN, TigerVNC, and Oracle SQL Developer up and running (and SQL Developer, written in Java, is by nature a memory pig).
NoScript, above all else, is the reason I run Firefox. I don't even bother with AdBlockPlus, since static ads don't really bother me, and NoScript does a fine job of scrubbing out the annoyances.
I couldn't have said it better myself, although I haven't had a problem with drivers breaking. Still, it seriously pissed me off when they started screwing with my window buttons, and don't get me started on Unity - or GNOME 3 for that matter. Focus-follows-mouse, HELLO?! Where did you go?!!
I'm still wondering where I'll go once 10.04 LTS dries up. I'd go back to CentOS, but they've had real trouble keeping up with upstream releases over the last year. At that point, Scientific Linux may be my choice.
I get that it works for you, but why do people who never use a smartphone feel the need to comment on a topic based around people who use a smart phone and use it a lot?
Maybe because I wanted to get one that didn't cost more per month than my home internet connection, and wasn't saddled with misfeatures designed to con the victims, er, customers into spending even more? I'd love to be able to jump on the Internet wherever I go, whenever I want, but not if it's going to to be a neverending ripoff. Maybe you like bending over for the likes of Verizon and AT&T, but don't assume everyone else does.
As it is, the shortest book ever written is "Cell Phone Companies that Don't Suck."
I tried a Virgin Mobile prepaid phone a few weeks ago (which uses Sprint's network and no other) - and found myself completely unable to activate the phone because there wasn't a signal, in spite of what the coverage map showed. I ended up returning the phone for a refund.
I'll stick with my TracFone for now - since I rarely text, and don't use it often, I can keep it going for less than $7/month, and I can get a decent signal just about anywhere. It sucks in other ways, though - the camera is craptastic, and the phone is deliberately crippled so that you can't get pictures in or out except via MMS, but I can live with that.
GM has been offering passenger diesels in Europe for ages. Before he moved to the US, my brother-in-law drove a diesel Vauxhall Vectra in England. He was wondering why the hell they didn't offer any small diesels in the US. The diesel Vectra used an Isuzu engine.
Diesels don't rely on coils and spark plugs. The compression ratio is high enough that the air heats sufficiently during the compression stroke to make the fuel autoignite when it is injected into the cylinder at/near top dead center. On the other hand, that means the injector pumps (or single pump in a common-rail system) must develop extremely high pressure in order to actually inject the fuel.
For cold starting, there are glow plugs to help heat the air - they are basically heating elements.
The WRT54G started going downhill when they started reducing the amount of flash and switched to VxWorks. On the other hand, my WRT54Gv2 (flashed with DD-WRT) has been rock solid. I recently tried replacing it with a Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH (flashed with the Buffalo-branded DD-WRT), but wound up going back to the old Linksys, as the new router kept dropping the wireless connection for no apparent reason As it turns out, that's a known problem with the WZR.
Ever since I first encountered roundabouts on a trip to the UK, I've found that I really hate four-way stops. Aside from the unnecessary, gas-wasting stop when there's no other traffic, it turns into chaos when you have cars lined up in all four directions.
That "cooperation is un-American" BS sounds exactly like the sort of willful stupidity that's turning this country to crap.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe this is a sign that their QA is starting to slip?
It wouldn't surprise me (but the problem may go well beyond Intel). Of the three motherboards that have ever failed on me over 30+ years, two were Intel (a D101GGC and a DG43NB). Neither of them were ever run from crap PSUs, and both had blown capacitors. Even weirder, the caps were all from respected capacitor firms (Nippon Chemi-Con on the DG43NB and Matsushita on the D101GGC). I guess it's a Good Thing that Intel is exiting the motherboard business.
The third board that failed was an Abit KT7-RAID... one of the early infamous examples of capacitor plague.
Indeed. Belkin has been on my "do not buy" list ever since the spam router fiasco. Then again, I guess it's fitting, after Linksys' Cloud Connect WTF.
On the other hand, anything that won't run DD-WRT, Tomato, or OpenWRT is on my "do not buy" list anyway...
My 2010 Honda's manual very specifically says not to use ethanol blends higher than 10%. I'll trust Honda's word over those of the corn lobby.
Coming soon: "Don't Whiz on the Electric Fence" championship edition.
IMO, they were the best laptop keyboards around - unfortunately, someone thought that "chiclet keyboards with flat tops are kewl!" and now all of the recent laptops I've seen for sale have keyboards that SUCK. Don't even get me started on the incredible disappearing TrackPoint.
The flat keytop nonsense has spread to desktop keyboards as well. HELLO?! Does anyone actually TEST these things to see if they're actually useful for typing?
If only Creative wouldn't have shit in their customers laps when Vista rolled around and actually offered proper drivers for the thing.
That sounds awfully familiar. I have an E-MU 0404 USB audio interface - the sound is absolutely wonderful, but they never got beyond a poorly functioning beta driver for Windows 7, so I'm stuck with XP, or getting a different interface such as a Focusrite. The ASUS cards seem like they'd be nice, but I don't want baked-in equalization that I can't change.
Recent Linux kernels seem to support the box, but no Linux audio player can manage my music library as well as Foobar2000, and WINE won't let me go to 24-bit 96 kHz.
It's a shame Creative took over E-MU.
Just because I state a non-popular opinion, instead of debate, I get modded to hell. It looks like all of the cool kids are attacking Oracle these days, so anything other than full retard anit-Oracle is acceptable.
When you resort to ad hominem attacks ("freetards," "full retard," etc.), you've already lost the debate.
But let's look at Oracle's track record. Their handling of OpenSolaris leaves a lot to be desired, to say the least. I could go on, but I guess you don't want to hear anything from "freetards."
Of course, you have to rely on audio hardware vendors actually supporting the nifty new Windows 7 sound layer. If that vendor happens to be Creative, you're screwed, particularly if the product is discontinued. Case in point: the E-MU 0404 USB, which has a beta Windows 7 driver that hasn't ever been updated.
It works beautifully on an XP desktop system, and recent Linux kernels seem to support it at least for playback. On Linux, the Clementine audio player works well, but I like Foobar2000 better. Unfortunately, Foobar2000 doesn't work in Linux except under Wine, and Wine doesn't work all that well with the 0404 USB.
I tried running XP under VirtualBox with the 0404 USB passed through, but that just doesn't work - virtualization and timing-critical hardware are a bad mix. I hate the idea that I'd have to dedicate a box to running XP just for audio purposes and nothing else, but that might be what happens unless I can find an audio player that manages my music collection as well as Foobar2000. As it is, I do anything important (email, online banking, etc.) from Linux.
At any rate, I have no compelling reason to go to Windows 7 let alone Windows 8. On my last go-around with Windows 8 CP, I hated it - they're making the same mistake, albeit in a different direction, that the Unity and GNOME 3 developers are making. A tablet UI is great for a tablet, not for a desktop.
As for Creative, I learned my lesson the hard way - don't buy their gear.
The funny thing about this is that you occasionally see the Pre-Columbia-Pictures Sony in some products
Another example, surprisingly enough, is an audio recorder, the PCM-M10. Uncharacteristically for Sony, it accepts MicroSDHC cards as well as yet another variant of the Memory Stick. If I didn't already have an Olympus recorder that does all I need, I might consider it... except that I just can't bring myself to buy a Sony product.
But, just when I thought that Sony might have picked up some Clue, along comes the PS Vita that doesn't even use Memory Stick, instead using a new flash memory format used by nothing else. DIAF, Sony.
Well, NoScript put a big yellow box at the top of this article, so at least I didn't have to watch it. Did the video auto-play, too? There are few things on the web that I hate more than auto-playing commercials.
NoScript makes the web bearable these days, but it's a crying shame that it's necessary.
But, back to Slashdot, it seems to me like there's been an awful lot of shark-jumping since Taco left. I'm not going to completely bail just yet, but I'm finding myself spending less and less time here. It was great while it lasted!
One thing to note, though, is that Linode will sometimes hand out extras - and if it's disk space or RAM, you'll need to reboot to take advantage of it. :)
I've been a happy customer since 2003 - Linode was literally a day old (at least for public availability) when I first got a VPS from them. Over the years, CPU, RAM, disk capacity, and data transfer have steadily increased, for no extra charge, and the service has been rock-solid.
I had an '82 RX-7 about 20 years ago (damn, that long ago?!). On the plus side, it was damn fun to drive, the engine was silky smooth, and the car had beautiful styling. On the minus side, the E-Z-Flood manual choke was very touchy in cold weather, spark plugs and other mundane parts were ridiculously expensive, and it was expensive to insure.
The crowning irony: my 2010 Honda Fit has noticeably faster 0-60 and slightly faster quarter-mile times, outcorners the RX-7, and gets about 75% better fuel economy, and is cheaper to insure and seats four to boot. Both the Fit and the RX-7 had 5-speed manual transmissions; the Fit isn't so peppy with a slushbox.
In recent months, I've noticed that Google Maps satellite view has been pretty hideous in Firefox. Satellite view tiles get updated on a haphazard basis with long delays, and that wasn't the case beforehand. It's just as much a problem on fast machines as it is on slow ones. Recently, I decided to fire up Chrome, and, lo and behold, the satellite views work quite nicely.
It makes me wonder whether it's Firefox's fault, or if Google Maps has been tweaked to work better in Chrome, or perhaps both.
In my tests I found that anything short of a 3GHz P4 with HT is frankly unusable, with a new tab spiking the CPU to 100% and taking control away from the user for up to a minute, more like 3 minutes if they launch even an SD video. That is simply unacceptable, and that is with NO extensions but ABP and ForecastFox, the same as loaded on the Dragon. On the lowest machine i have, which is a 1.8GHz Sempron with 1.5Gb of RAM that I use as a nettop in the shop I found Firefox to be so sluggish it was just pathetic, the exact same machine with Dragon is a fine little web surfer.
Are you sure there isn't something else wrong (perhaps a resource-hogging antivirus package, or a badly-fragmented hard drive)? I know this is just another anecdote, but I'm writing this from a system that's about identical to your low-end box (1.8 GHz Sempron and 1.5 GB RAM, onboard NVidia 6100, XP Home SP3), and FF 6.0.2 is quite peppy and responsive. A new blank tab comes up instantly, and a new tab with a page doesn't take any longer to load than if I didn't open the tab. Granted, I don't keep 100 tabs open, but I often have 8-10 up. As for extensions, I have NoScript, PrefBar, and DownThemAll installed. At the moment, I have Thunderbird, GVim, PuTTY, OpenVPN, TigerVNC, and Oracle SQL Developer up and running (and SQL Developer, written in Java, is by nature a memory pig).
NoScript, above all else, is the reason I run Firefox. I don't even bother with AdBlockPlus, since static ads don't really bother me, and NoScript does a fine job of scrubbing out the annoyances.
I couldn't have said it better myself, although I haven't had a problem with drivers breaking. Still, it seriously pissed me off when they started screwing with my window buttons, and don't get me started on Unity - or GNOME 3 for that matter. Focus-follows-mouse, HELLO?! Where did you go?!!
I'm still wondering where I'll go once 10.04 LTS dries up. I'd go back to CentOS, but they've had real trouble keeping up with upstream releases over the last year. At that point, Scientific Linux may be my choice.
Or flushed it down a toilet.
I get that it works for you, but why do people who never use a smartphone feel the need to comment on a topic based around people who use a smart phone and use it a lot?
Maybe because I wanted to get one that didn't cost more per month than my home internet connection, and wasn't saddled with misfeatures designed to con the victims, er, customers into spending even more? I'd love to be able to jump on the Internet wherever I go, whenever I want, but not if it's going to to be a neverending ripoff. Maybe you like bending over for the likes of Verizon and AT&T, but don't assume everyone else does.
As it is, the shortest book ever written is "Cell Phone Companies that Don't Suck."
...and thanks for all the first posts!
It's been a great run - I hope your next endeavor hits it big.
I tried a Virgin Mobile prepaid phone a few weeks ago (which uses Sprint's network and no other) - and found myself completely unable to activate the phone because there wasn't a signal, in spite of what the coverage map showed. I ended up returning the phone for a refund.
I'll stick with my TracFone for now - since I rarely text, and don't use it often, I can keep it going for less than $7/month, and I can get a decent signal just about anywhere. It sucks in other ways, though - the camera is craptastic, and the phone is deliberately crippled so that you can't get pictures in or out except via MMS, but I can live with that.
GM has been offering passenger diesels in Europe for ages. Before he moved to the US, my brother-in-law drove a diesel Vauxhall Vectra in England. He was wondering why the hell they didn't offer any small diesels in the US. The diesel Vectra used an Isuzu engine.
Diesels don't rely on coils and spark plugs. The compression ratio is high enough that the air heats sufficiently during the compression stroke to make the fuel autoignite when it is injected into the cylinder at/near top dead center. On the other hand, that means the injector pumps (or single pump in a common-rail system) must develop extremely high pressure in order to actually inject the fuel.
For cold starting, there are glow plugs to help heat the air - they are basically heating elements.
The WRT54G started going downhill when they started reducing the amount of flash and switched to VxWorks. On the other hand, my WRT54Gv2 (flashed with DD-WRT) has been rock solid. I recently tried replacing it with a Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH (flashed with the Buffalo-branded DD-WRT), but wound up going back to the old Linksys, as the new router kept dropping the wireless connection for no apparent reason As it turns out, that's a known problem with the WZR.
The biggest thing is that they drastically reduce serious (injury/fatal) accidents. Fender-benders are the main risk.
Ever since I first encountered roundabouts on a trip to the UK, I've found that I really hate four-way stops. Aside from the unnecessary, gas-wasting stop when there's no other traffic, it turns into chaos when you have cars lined up in all four directions.
That "cooperation is un-American" BS sounds exactly like the sort of willful stupidity that's turning this country to crap.