I'd be willing to pay a small yearly fee to use google as it is now over something that's bloated with this extra ads and junk such as the other pages.
I'm not a big fan of paying for everything (especially websites, email services or such), but the other search engines are really annoying with this stuff.
"To google for something" has became part of common language. People have associated the word with the web search concept, plus it does a great job and is quite innovative.
Every once in a while, I'll use yahoo (as I have an old email there mostly) or when google won't find something (almost never).
But don't count on me to use MSN. I think I've already paid far too much microsoft tax (starting to become more and more fed up about these guys), and they really don't need advertizing revenue from me. And the only way they seem to be able to get half decent results - is by using some bots to harvest google results (not completely ethical imho). Plus, I've always seen "MSN" as crap - especially after having seen the IM. Plus their webpage is quite "graphically overloaded" (yahoo is a bit like that too, flash ads are particularly annoying). When I want to do a quick search, I like google simple logo (which changes with holidays) and a simple seach box.
Google works. The results are great, the (text) ads are unobtrusive, they're innovative, and they've earned everyone's trust. Competition is good sometimes, but I'm not about to switch to another search engine.
Good point, but from what I've seen, it's not always the same main problem consistently, and in many cases, even without that first "main" problem, there are still a lot of major obstacles on the course.
Lack of resources has been my major problem (trying to get some work done on some project, but you get stuck as DBA for a bunch of servers and sql servers on the side, meetings, and so much other stuff that you have really no time left -or not enough at least- to code)
Then there's those every-changing requirements on some projects. Take almost a month for most IT managers to come up with a set of features and requirements - only to have the core ones changed every week. Some people just don't realize how much sometimes what seems "minor" to them really means "might as well ditch everything and start from scratch all over again - for the nth time". Then to only find out users want completely different features that aren't eaily integrable with current product.
I just got tasked with some new project, and this time, the main problem is gonna be something different again. The old product has such an interface (you have *NEVER* seen anything this bad in your life - honest!), that I can't even figure out what it's supposed to be or supposed to do. I have to arrange meetings with future users to find out what we need to come up with, what it's supposed to do and such. (and that's besides a lot of training we'll have to give some of these people) Getting started properly on this is going to be quite a challenge.
There may be a limited amount of "main" problems under which most failed projects fall under, but I don't think it's always the same one at the top.
Re:Does anyone else find it irritating...
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Mac mini to PC Hack
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Ever since the free iPods site, every forum I go to is just full of these in either sigs or actual posts. In some cases I've seen people register to a forum just so they could post about it...
And now it's free iPods, free iPod minis, free flat screens, free iMac minis, free this, free that.
Definately annoying. There was a story on/. not long ago about people getting rid of internet because of spam and such. I think this is gonna soon be the next biggest reason. I'm more sick of free whatever sigs than ads on tv - and that's hard to beat.
HTPC wise, complexity, time and effort to setup, resolve issues and such make using single purpose devices a lot attractive.
My satellite PVR records with 100% quality of the original show (unlike analog capture solutions). It works right out of the box. Plus it, grab the remote and watch TV.
HTPC wise, you have to put the PC together (costly too) install the OS, drivers and patches. Then dozens of programs that don't usually integrate too well, tons of codecs (which lots of times can cause real problems). Then you have to configure every app, and probably worst of all - configure the remote control software to work with everything in a semi-useable way (using girder or similar).
One little problem can make the whole thing unusable. (installing ffdshow usually screws up xvid/divx playback, unless i use custom media playback in zoomplayer).
Plus TV out of a lot of video cards is a lot worse than of that a 50$ DVD player (especially for interlaced displays).
Not all people want to go thru all this. And like I've heard too many times about XP MCE PC's - do you want your "TV" to BSOD at the middle of a movie? Have to reboot, have to apply patches, updates and stuff?
There's lots of non-linux alternatives as well (my HTPC doesn't run linux). And there's a lot of free software that also works with "soft mode" DVB cards. My SS2 (DVB-S) was £50. The only bad thing is those dvb apps (I use dvb dream mostly) don't integrate too well with most HTPC "front ends" (like Meedio and others). Still beats analog capturing/time shifting.
Not that I've played with either (my HTPC has always been running on windows), but this sounds like a good alternative to us all using DVB captures instead of crappy analog captures (once you try DVB capturing, you never want to go back).
Sounds like this could go nicely with VDR (unless VDR already has those kinds of things in it already?).
It seems that the only kind of digital capturing that any companies are interested into is for OTA HDTV, but it would be nice to have something for digital cable or satellite (well, we already have DVB-S covered). For once, microsoft might be the only ones with enough money and power to convince big media companies to let them record the decrypted digital signal directly, as long as they use their DRM. At least you'd have good quality timeshifted/recorded shows, but that's never gonna happen.
In some PVR software reviews, I remember seeing them mentionning how they've designed it to accomodate for things like rabbit ears (and analog cable). Here, everybody I know has either satellite or digital cable (probably twice as many with satellite).
There is no real need to encode to anything, I don't even know why you're onto that. Linear PCM works for normal sound, and they pass real AC3/DTS sound just fine. And all is very well supported. Never had a single glitch (unlike say, with my 350$ SB Live 5.1 Platinum, which BSOD'ed any KT133 chipset PC, had broken AC3 passthru basically until XP was out). No way I'd use analog sound, there's no need for it whatsoever.
As for RAID, if you're really into a high availability scenario, then you should be using a real server. You're missing the intended market completely. And as far as the broken adapter, no motherboards available and all, that's FUD. 99%+ chances are - one of your drives will fail - not the board. And since you're into a high availability setup, you should be using a real server with hardware raid 0+5/5+0, and not even be looking at these. People buy these and throw a couple 200GB SATA drives in raid0 for cheap. Works very well for home use or non mission critical stuff, and the price is quite right too. Some motherboards hardly over 49$ have SATA RAID. There's no point of trying to save 5$ off the board and not including it when a lot of people will miss the feature. Again, there are other boards on the market without that if you don't want them, but there is definately people who use all these features, especially when it's all bundled at a decent price and good support.
PCI-E GB Nics aren't cheap, and we're really just starting to have boards that have the slots. The normal PCI ones I have (at home) still work very well, and it definately beats having 100BT instead.
I'm all for taking expensive hardware and making it a commodity on most motherboards, like they already added USB2 and Firewire.
As for the spdif output, you're wrong. You can either pass AC3 or DTS audio from such as source to it's output, or play normal stereo sources as 2.0 - even on 20$ cards. The added strenght of the nforce chipsets over the expensive PCI cards here is that in fact, it actually CAN do realtime Dolby Digital encoding @ 640kbps (I have yet to see a DVD use over 448) if you want it to. Also, don't forget spdif can pass Linear PCM, not just DD/AC3 and DTS (and then passthru the AC3/DTS when playing it instead).
Who said ANALOG onboard sound? (anybody uses that still? all spdif here). spdif wise, unless you count jitter, there is no difference - actually, the nforce chipsets have the lead on this point. Speakers are a non issue.
About the 16x SATA, I guess I shouldn't have trusted what the store I checked mentionned ("ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe Dual DDR 2x PCI-E, 16x SATA RAID, 2x GB Lan"), but it still has quite a few connections. Which is always nice to have...
2 GB Nics? It is useful. We have servers with redundant NICs - and GB Nics. Why not have best of both worlds bundled? At home, you could use it to bridge your network - saving to buy a expensive GB switch for a few PCs. It can't hurt, can't be worse than a single 100BT.
There's plenty of just as expensive barebone, featureless motherboards if you want, asking you to keep overpriced PCI card businesses alive.
I don't know what you're talking about. Bundling nice and important features (increasing value) is a good thing. Cheap onboard sound? Most these motherboards have 8 channel digital sound. A comparable creative (no thanks!) sound card cost almost as much as the motherboard alone. Useless onboard NIC? I don't know which ones you've tried, but I have yet to see one give me problems, from crappy ECS K7S5A motherboards to nice GBit lan on Asus boards. They just work. Cheap software RAID? If you want hardware RAID, go buy a "real" controller. It'll cost you a LOT more than the whole board does. For a lot of people, it's VERY valueable. No more promise-brand cards to buy that cost more than the mobo to do that.
What's next? "I don't want no crappy onboard USB2? No Firewire?"
I'm looking at a Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI and the ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe right now. They may be a bit more expensive, but they have nice things on them like 16x SATA RAID, SATA2, 2x GB LAN, 802.11g, IEE1394B, 8 channel digital audio (depending on which one you like better). Might look like crap to you, but it sure looks like a lot of nice stuff to me.
And no, I'm no "enthusiast", overclocker, nor gamer. It's just a nice board with everything one needs or just about. No need to buy a bunch of 100$ PCI cards to have a complete system.
At work? We wouldn't just rely on batteries in the VoIP box, but it would be on UPS, and we have diesel generators for things that can't go down.
At home? Cell works. Worst case scenario, you still have neighbours.
Extremely long power outages are not very common (here at least, only seen that once after a hurricane). And in which case it might not be your problem. I didn't have phone or cable going to the house anymore, my neighbour didn't have power lines anymore. All these trees around took care of it. You only get so much extra security from having POTS instead.
A good part of VoIP providers don't offer E911 service mind you, and that's a bit scarier.
Exactly. I'm about to do the switch to VoIP at home because it will be a lot cheaper. 18$ for the base and 1.9 cents a minute (canadian $), versus > 65$ for limited long distance, and you pay for the whole long distance plan whether you use it or not. I'd have to talk over like 2500 minutes to pay the same using VoIP. And there's a lot of other advantages.
For companies, costs are much higher. We lease some phone switches from the local telco for over a million a pop, plus the ones we already own. That's major $$ if you ask me. Add leased lines and local lines, and the bill is that much higher (especially we already pay for a OC3... plenty to add some VoIP traffic).
You could use some cheap asterix boxes (especially if you compare to the price of leasing a PBX), but then again there's the price of replacing the phones (can be rather costly, do the math). Replacing all the infrastructure would be expensive at first, but after that, going with some cheap VoIP provider for outgoing calls would cut a LOT into monthly bills.
Those projectors are god awful, but if you do the math, real projectors aren't that expensive...
Look at the price of 2 tickets plus babysitters (or tickets for the whole family), add the expensive drinks and junk food for all, transportation and all... It adds up really quick.
You can get some DLP projectors under 1000$ easily (and I haven't bothered even looking for used projectors or DIY ones like seen on tomshardware and such). Looks steep, but multiply your average outing cost by how often you go and it doesn't seem so bad anymore.
At home, there's nobody around making noise, getting up or anything. You can pause the movie. A sound level you like. Cheap drinks/pop corn/junk food - you can even have drinks with alcohol. Lots of reasons to prefer home.
You're right. And I think it might make the problem worse. This means I can play it in full scree having my video card's s-video output not only passing the signal to my TV, but also passing it to a capture card (same for sound). So right after the first time it's watched, someone can have a very good quality copy (especially if you're comparing to a telesync or cam). Then within a couple hours they can have encoded it as mpeg 4 AVC or xvid or whatever.
Result is, you have a system that lets people have high quality copies, non DRM'ed, for free. Then people have to choose between paying for a watch-once DRM'ed copy that might only run on whatever player/OS combo, or getting a non-DRM'ed, near-DVD quality copy that they can watch over and over again and lend to friends - for free. No need for pirates to take cameras in theaters and risk jail - and much better quality. And the worse part is - you'll be able to see it on your home theater the day before it comes out in theaters...
Of course it's better not to use it. It's windows only, and it's not so much that it doesn't work in firefox, but rather doesn't work in anything else than IE (except like say, maxthon, which is a IE "addon shell"). IE: good luck getting ActiveX stuff to work on safari, or konqueror on linux, or whatever.
I think, we're faced with 3 main problems:
1) Webmasters. There's a LOT of sub-par webmasters out there. A very high number of sites can't even get pages with validating html - let alone xhtml and css. The technology is evolving fast, but not all webmasters are following. A lot of them are completely unaware of those IE-only issues. Sad, but you just can't make "bad" webmasters go away.
2) Big corporations that don't really care. A lot of things (like *shudder* remedy online forms) use some IE only features. Perhaps enough bad feedback would let them have a different point of view and adjust accordingly. Since they're used mostly by big corps that run mostly windows, I think they take for granted everybody uses IE.
3) Embedded webservers (in firmware) like in HP LJ's that use IE specific stuff (maybe not all models?). Perhaps a firmware upgrade could do away with the stuff? Doubt they'll spend any $ fixing old gear, so that will only go away with life cycling.
Our main webmaster at work sometimes uses a MediaPlayer ActiveX control to connect to a Windows Media Server box. I truly hate the idea, but there are only so many alternatives. Perhaps we could use QuickTime instead, but otherwise, other solutions always come down to missing codecs, need to install players, bandwith requirements or other issues.
I so wish people sticked to W3C standards, and no proprietary crap... I'm getting sick of this MS mess, and I'm looking at switching to linux now.
I wonder if it's really that graphic intensive (not gonna bother downloading it yet though). Seeing things like this get added to XP and things like WinFS taken out of LH, it's making it less and less attractive to ever upgrade to LH. For the first time in my life, I feel like either 1) lots of people will stick to XP, or 2) a lot of people will move on to linux instead.
I've been using pretty only windows in the last few years (ever since I got rid of my atari 1040 and older stuff), coding for it and all... But I'm really loosing interest in the "new" stuff they come out with (like, I got all the themes and such crap all off - "classic" look). It just seems more bloated, and they're trying to put some "nice" (they think it is, anyways) GUI so lusers aren't scared anymore, when in fact, I find it's becoming quite a mess - and an overly bloated one, that is.
I've tried knoppix 3.7 a couple days ago, and I must say it's a VERY viable option for most stuff. Yes, I had a few problems (enabling spdif out on sb lives, xmms wouldn't play mp3's off smb and small things), and it won't run all my usual apps (photoshop, ms office...), but I was very surprised nonetheless. There were some compilers in there, a CAD program (shocked me), OO loaded slow (of course) but it wasn't half bad... It was really easy to pick up and find everything.
Most people I know all love their windows/autocad/photoshop/etc (not that they know how to use it) - but that's mostly because they didn't pay the hefty price tag, but this does the most part, for free (legit). I'm starting to seriously consider "doing the switch", at least on one PC to give it a good try.
I think LH itself is what will make the most people switch to linux (especially combined with all the spyware and other crap most lusers have been crippled with lately). I only see bad in LH - and I'm mostly known as a M$-fanboy... But that's changing lately. I've been starting to convert myself to more open, portable (and perhaps more stable/secure) options (like using LAMP instead of ASP or ASP.Net/IIS/SQL Server like we use at work and such) and I'm liking it, a lot (cheap to host, too). Now if I could find a replacement for most apps (including VS.Net), I think I'd be sold.
To me, that MS-world is just unsustainable. Everybody I know only use it because they can use pirated everything for free. I don't think I know anyone who wants to - or can afford to buy a new windows, office, and everything else license every year (or even for every second version - and who wants to stick to old soft?). I don't mind paying a minimal fee for a good distro or such, but what I use daily on a win box cost me over a few months' salary... How much longer can we keep up with this dream of being afford to use all these apps that cost hundreds of $? (yes, I know, big corps can afford it... whatever).
Right. I've always wondered why they spam this stuff:
-How much "small guys" are out there that need "enlargements"?
-People who need viagra can get it from their docs easily, and it's not that expensive at all (heck, the doctors offer them so much, it's almost annoying) Pain killers are harder to get and cost more, but I doubt they're cheap illegally (or do they even work?) and who wants to risk getting in legal troubles? My insurance pays for mine (partial SCI, chronic pain...)
-Not like you can tell your friend's (who works at minimum wage) rolex is a fake;)
But then again, if they do it... There must be some very gullible people clicking on them.
That would almost be funny - they use IE once and get loaded with spyware, then their PC refuses to run anything else than the 3 spyware processes (it won't even let the others start). That's not to mention viruses and other nasties.
800x600 is very low too.
And lets be honest. Do you think that a 4 year old Dell motherboard is more easily replaced than an Apple board?
Absolutely. It might be a socket 370, but even though they can't be found anymore new, you could find one locally same day for dirt cheap (used), or just buy any cheap Socket A system and CPU for not a whole lot (even less if used) - and it will work just fine with whatever OS you're using (just a matter of using proper drivers). One of the nice things is - I can get the parts within minutes if I need to, and still for little $.
While I can't say about G4's...
Any 3 year old PC should be able to boot XP and use office just fine. It runs quite smoothly on a 600MHz box as long as you have enough ram (256MB+). In fact, I doubt a G4 would work anywhere near this fast.
I see very little use for a floppy as well. But when it comes to serial and parallel ports, lots of people still use them. I use them all the time. Ok, not ALL people need them, but to remove them all... They'd be selling a lot of controllers. Think printers (I'm not trading my laserjet for some cheap USB P.O.S.), networking gear, IR receivers (and various HTPC gear), X10 controllers, PIC/EPROM programmers (anything electronics...) There's a lot of uses for it still.
Aren't we waiting a long time for all this new technology to come out? I've been waiting to a BTX FF motherboard, socket 939 and with PCI-E on it. I'm starting to wonder if I won't be waiting 'till 2007 to be able to buy one. Is it just me, or all these nice and new things are just taking forever to show up?
I have to go against what most people say here...
I had a not-so-old yet 80gb drive (like, a few days over warranty) fail on me lately. (was a Western Digital). It was my 2003 server, luckily, it was just used as the OS drive (and to store a couple other things) - one NTFS partition. I've tried knoppix, and it was of no help. Mind you most tools (ntfsdos pro, Win PE, ERDC, - the list is long). The only thing somehow that managed to read some stuff back was another Win 2003 box. By that, I mean that I managed to see what was on it (a couple HD transportstreams I had to put somewhere to make space), but not recover anything...
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I'd be willing to pay a small yearly fee to use google as it is now over something that's bloated with this extra ads and junk such as the other pages. I'm not a big fan of paying for everything (especially websites, email services or such), but the other search engines are really annoying with this stuff.
"To google for something" has became part of common language. People have associated the word with the web search concept, plus it does a great job and is quite innovative.
Every once in a while, I'll use yahoo (as I have an old email there mostly) or when google won't find something (almost never).
But don't count on me to use MSN. I think I've already paid far too much microsoft tax (starting to become more and more fed up about these guys), and they really don't need advertizing revenue from me. And the only way they seem to be able to get half decent results - is by using some bots to harvest google results (not completely ethical imho). Plus, I've always seen "MSN" as crap - especially after having seen the IM. Plus their webpage is quite "graphically overloaded" (yahoo is a bit like that too, flash ads are particularly annoying). When I want to do a quick search, I like google simple logo (which changes with holidays) and a simple seach box.
Google works. The results are great, the (text) ads are unobtrusive, they're innovative, and they've earned everyone's trust. Competition is good sometimes, but I'm not about to switch to another search engine.
Good point, but from what I've seen, it's not always the same main problem consistently, and in many cases, even without that first "main" problem, there are still a lot of major obstacles on the course. Lack of resources has been my major problem (trying to get some work done on some project, but you get stuck as DBA for a bunch of servers and sql servers on the side, meetings, and so much other stuff that you have really no time left -or not enough at least- to code) Then there's those every-changing requirements on some projects. Take almost a month for most IT managers to come up with a set of features and requirements - only to have the core ones changed every week. Some people just don't realize how much sometimes what seems "minor" to them really means "might as well ditch everything and start from scratch all over again - for the nth time". Then to only find out users want completely different features that aren't eaily integrable with current product. I just got tasked with some new project, and this time, the main problem is gonna be something different again. The old product has such an interface (you have *NEVER* seen anything this bad in your life - honest!), that I can't even figure out what it's supposed to be or supposed to do. I have to arrange meetings with future users to find out what we need to come up with, what it's supposed to do and such. (and that's besides a lot of training we'll have to give some of these people) Getting started properly on this is going to be quite a challenge. There may be a limited amount of "main" problems under which most failed projects fall under, but I don't think it's always the same one at the top.
Ever since the free iPods site, every forum I go to is just full of these in either sigs or actual posts. In some cases I've seen people register to a forum just so they could post about it... And now it's free iPods, free iPod minis, free flat screens, free iMac minis, free this, free that. Definately annoying. There was a story on /. not long ago about people getting rid of internet because of spam and such. I think this is gonna soon be the next biggest reason. I'm more sick of free whatever sigs than ads on tv - and that's hard to beat.
HTPC wise, complexity, time and effort to setup, resolve issues and such make using single purpose devices a lot attractive. My satellite PVR records with 100% quality of the original show (unlike analog capture solutions). It works right out of the box. Plus it, grab the remote and watch TV. HTPC wise, you have to put the PC together (costly too) install the OS, drivers and patches. Then dozens of programs that don't usually integrate too well, tons of codecs (which lots of times can cause real problems). Then you have to configure every app, and probably worst of all - configure the remote control software to work with everything in a semi-useable way (using girder or similar). One little problem can make the whole thing unusable. (installing ffdshow usually screws up xvid/divx playback, unless i use custom media playback in zoomplayer). Plus TV out of a lot of video cards is a lot worse than of that a 50$ DVD player (especially for interlaced displays). Not all people want to go thru all this. And like I've heard too many times about XP MCE PC's - do you want your "TV" to BSOD at the middle of a movie? Have to reboot, have to apply patches, updates and stuff?
There's lots of non-linux alternatives as well (my HTPC doesn't run linux). And there's a lot of free software that also works with "soft mode" DVB cards. My SS2 (DVB-S) was £50. The only bad thing is those dvb apps (I use dvb dream mostly) don't integrate too well with most HTPC "front ends" (like Meedio and others). Still beats analog capturing/time shifting.
Not that I've played with either (my HTPC has always been running on windows), but this sounds like a good alternative to us all using DVB captures instead of crappy analog captures (once you try DVB capturing, you never want to go back). Sounds like this could go nicely with VDR (unless VDR already has those kinds of things in it already?). It seems that the only kind of digital capturing that any companies are interested into is for OTA HDTV, but it would be nice to have something for digital cable or satellite (well, we already have DVB-S covered). For once, microsoft might be the only ones with enough money and power to convince big media companies to let them record the decrypted digital signal directly, as long as they use their DRM. At least you'd have good quality timeshifted/recorded shows, but that's never gonna happen. In some PVR software reviews, I remember seeing them mentionning how they've designed it to accomodate for things like rabbit ears (and analog cable). Here, everybody I know has either satellite or digital cable (probably twice as many with satellite).
There is no real need to encode to anything, I don't even know why you're onto that. Linear PCM works for normal sound, and they pass real AC3/DTS sound just fine. And all is very well supported. Never had a single glitch (unlike say, with my 350$ SB Live 5.1 Platinum, which BSOD'ed any KT133 chipset PC, had broken AC3 passthru basically until XP was out). No way I'd use analog sound, there's no need for it whatsoever. As for RAID, if you're really into a high availability scenario, then you should be using a real server. You're missing the intended market completely. And as far as the broken adapter, no motherboards available and all, that's FUD. 99%+ chances are - one of your drives will fail - not the board. And since you're into a high availability setup, you should be using a real server with hardware raid 0+5/5+0, and not even be looking at these. People buy these and throw a couple 200GB SATA drives in raid0 for cheap. Works very well for home use or non mission critical stuff, and the price is quite right too. Some motherboards hardly over 49$ have SATA RAID. There's no point of trying to save 5$ off the board and not including it when a lot of people will miss the feature. Again, there are other boards on the market without that if you don't want them, but there is definately people who use all these features, especially when it's all bundled at a decent price and good support.
PCI-E GB Nics aren't cheap, and we're really just starting to have boards that have the slots. The normal PCI ones I have (at home) still work very well, and it definately beats having 100BT instead. I'm all for taking expensive hardware and making it a commodity on most motherboards, like they already added USB2 and Firewire. As for the spdif output, you're wrong. You can either pass AC3 or DTS audio from such as source to it's output, or play normal stereo sources as 2.0 - even on 20$ cards. The added strenght of the nforce chipsets over the expensive PCI cards here is that in fact, it actually CAN do realtime Dolby Digital encoding @ 640kbps (I have yet to see a DVD use over 448) if you want it to. Also, don't forget spdif can pass Linear PCM, not just DD/AC3 and DTS (and then passthru the AC3/DTS when playing it instead).
Who said ANALOG onboard sound? (anybody uses that still? all spdif here). spdif wise, unless you count jitter, there is no difference - actually, the nforce chipsets have the lead on this point. Speakers are a non issue. About the 16x SATA, I guess I shouldn't have trusted what the store I checked mentionned ("ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe Dual DDR 2x PCI-E, 16x SATA RAID, 2x GB Lan"), but it still has quite a few connections. Which is always nice to have... 2 GB Nics? It is useful. We have servers with redundant NICs - and GB Nics. Why not have best of both worlds bundled? At home, you could use it to bridge your network - saving to buy a expensive GB switch for a few PCs. It can't hurt, can't be worse than a single 100BT. There's plenty of just as expensive barebone, featureless motherboards if you want, asking you to keep overpriced PCI card businesses alive.
I don't know what you're talking about. Bundling nice and important features (increasing value) is a good thing. Cheap onboard sound? Most these motherboards have 8 channel digital sound. A comparable creative (no thanks!) sound card cost almost as much as the motherboard alone. Useless onboard NIC? I don't know which ones you've tried, but I have yet to see one give me problems, from crappy ECS K7S5A motherboards to nice GBit lan on Asus boards. They just work. Cheap software RAID? If you want hardware RAID, go buy a "real" controller. It'll cost you a LOT more than the whole board does. For a lot of people, it's VERY valueable. No more promise-brand cards to buy that cost more than the mobo to do that. What's next? "I don't want no crappy onboard USB2? No Firewire?" I'm looking at a Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI and the ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe right now. They may be a bit more expensive, but they have nice things on them like 16x SATA RAID, SATA2, 2x GB LAN, 802.11g, IEE1394B, 8 channel digital audio (depending on which one you like better). Might look like crap to you, but it sure looks like a lot of nice stuff to me. And no, I'm no "enthusiast", overclocker, nor gamer. It's just a nice board with everything one needs or just about. No need to buy a bunch of 100$ PCI cards to have a complete system.
At work? We wouldn't just rely on batteries in the VoIP box, but it would be on UPS, and we have diesel generators for things that can't go down. At home? Cell works. Worst case scenario, you still have neighbours. Extremely long power outages are not very common (here at least, only seen that once after a hurricane). And in which case it might not be your problem. I didn't have phone or cable going to the house anymore, my neighbour didn't have power lines anymore. All these trees around took care of it. You only get so much extra security from having POTS instead. A good part of VoIP providers don't offer E911 service mind you, and that's a bit scarier.
Exactly. I'm about to do the switch to VoIP at home because it will be a lot cheaper. 18$ for the base and 1.9 cents a minute (canadian $), versus > 65$ for limited long distance, and you pay for the whole long distance plan whether you use it or not. I'd have to talk over like 2500 minutes to pay the same using VoIP. And there's a lot of other advantages.
For companies, costs are much higher. We lease some phone switches from the local telco for over a million a pop, plus the ones we already own. That's major $$ if you ask me. Add leased lines and local lines, and the bill is that much higher (especially we already pay for a OC3... plenty to add some VoIP traffic).
You could use some cheap asterix boxes (especially if you compare to the price of leasing a PBX), but then again there's the price of replacing the phones (can be rather costly, do the math). Replacing all the infrastructure would be expensive at first, but after that, going with some cheap VoIP provider for outgoing calls would cut a LOT into monthly bills.
Those projectors are god awful, but if you do the math, real projectors aren't that expensive... Look at the price of 2 tickets plus babysitters (or tickets for the whole family), add the expensive drinks and junk food for all, transportation and all... It adds up really quick. You can get some DLP projectors under 1000$ easily (and I haven't bothered even looking for used projectors or DIY ones like seen on tomshardware and such). Looks steep, but multiply your average outing cost by how often you go and it doesn't seem so bad anymore. At home, there's nobody around making noise, getting up or anything. You can pause the movie. A sound level you like. Cheap drinks/pop corn/junk food - you can even have drinks with alcohol. Lots of reasons to prefer home.
You're right. And I think it might make the problem worse. This means I can play it in full scree having my video card's s-video output not only passing the signal to my TV, but also passing it to a capture card (same for sound). So right after the first time it's watched, someone can have a very good quality copy (especially if you're comparing to a telesync or cam). Then within a couple hours they can have encoded it as mpeg 4 AVC or xvid or whatever. Result is, you have a system that lets people have high quality copies, non DRM'ed, for free. Then people have to choose between paying for a watch-once DRM'ed copy that might only run on whatever player/OS combo, or getting a non-DRM'ed, near-DVD quality copy that they can watch over and over again and lend to friends - for free. No need for pirates to take cameras in theaters and risk jail - and much better quality. And the worse part is - you'll be able to see it on your home theater the day before it comes out in theaters...
Of course it's better not to use it. It's windows only, and it's not so much that it doesn't work in firefox, but rather doesn't work in anything else than IE (except like say, maxthon, which is a IE "addon shell"). IE: good luck getting ActiveX stuff to work on safari, or konqueror on linux, or whatever. I think, we're faced with 3 main problems: 1) Webmasters. There's a LOT of sub-par webmasters out there. A very high number of sites can't even get pages with validating html - let alone xhtml and css. The technology is evolving fast, but not all webmasters are following. A lot of them are completely unaware of those IE-only issues. Sad, but you just can't make "bad" webmasters go away. 2) Big corporations that don't really care. A lot of things (like *shudder* remedy online forms) use some IE only features. Perhaps enough bad feedback would let them have a different point of view and adjust accordingly. Since they're used mostly by big corps that run mostly windows, I think they take for granted everybody uses IE. 3) Embedded webservers (in firmware) like in HP LJ's that use IE specific stuff (maybe not all models?). Perhaps a firmware upgrade could do away with the stuff? Doubt they'll spend any $ fixing old gear, so that will only go away with life cycling. Our main webmaster at work sometimes uses a MediaPlayer ActiveX control to connect to a Windows Media Server box. I truly hate the idea, but there are only so many alternatives. Perhaps we could use QuickTime instead, but otherwise, other solutions always come down to missing codecs, need to install players, bandwith requirements or other issues. I so wish people sticked to W3C standards, and no proprietary crap... I'm getting sick of this MS mess, and I'm looking at switching to linux now.
I wonder if it's really that graphic intensive (not gonna bother downloading it yet though). Seeing things like this get added to XP and things like WinFS taken out of LH, it's making it less and less attractive to ever upgrade to LH. For the first time in my life, I feel like either
1) lots of people will stick to XP, or
2) a lot of people will move on to linux instead.
I've been using pretty only windows in the last few years (ever since I got rid of my atari 1040 and older stuff), coding for it and all... But I'm really loosing interest in the "new" stuff they come out with (like, I got all the themes and such crap all off - "classic" look). It just seems more bloated, and they're trying to put some "nice" (they think it is, anyways) GUI so lusers aren't scared anymore, when in fact, I find it's becoming quite a mess - and an overly bloated one, that is.
I've tried knoppix 3.7 a couple days ago, and I must say it's a VERY viable option for most stuff. Yes, I had a few problems (enabling spdif out on sb lives, xmms wouldn't play mp3's off smb and small things), and it won't run all my usual apps (photoshop, ms office...), but I was very surprised nonetheless. There were some compilers in there, a CAD program (shocked me), OO loaded slow (of course) but it wasn't half bad... It was really easy to pick up and find everything.
Most people I know all love their windows/autocad/photoshop/etc (not that they know how to use it) - but that's mostly because they didn't pay the hefty price tag, but this does the most part, for free (legit). I'm starting to seriously consider "doing the switch", at least on one PC to give it a good try.
I think LH itself is what will make the most people switch to linux (especially combined with all the spyware and other crap most lusers have been crippled with lately). I only see bad in LH - and I'm mostly known as a M$-fanboy... But that's changing lately. I've been starting to convert myself to more open, portable (and perhaps more stable/secure) options (like using LAMP instead of ASP or ASP.Net/IIS/SQL Server like we use at work and such) and I'm liking it, a lot (cheap to host, too). Now if I could find a replacement for most apps (including VS.Net), I think I'd be sold.
To me, that MS-world is just unsustainable. Everybody I know only use it because they can use pirated everything for free. I don't think I know anyone who wants to - or can afford to buy a new windows, office, and everything else license every year (or even for every second version - and who wants to stick to old soft?). I don't mind paying a minimal fee for a good distro or such, but what I use daily on a win box cost me over a few months' salary... How much longer can we keep up with this dream of being afford to use all these apps that cost hundreds of $? (yes, I know, big corps can afford it... whatever).
Right. I've always wondered why they spam this stuff: -How much "small guys" are out there that need "enlargements"? -People who need viagra can get it from their docs easily, and it's not that expensive at all (heck, the doctors offer them so much, it's almost annoying) Pain killers are harder to get and cost more, but I doubt they're cheap illegally (or do they even work?) and who wants to risk getting in legal troubles? My insurance pays for mine (partial SCI, chronic pain...) -Not like you can tell your friend's (who works at minimum wage) rolex is a fake ;)
But then again, if they do it... There must be some very gullible people clicking on them.
That would almost be funny - they use IE once and get loaded with spyware, then their PC refuses to run anything else than the 3 spyware processes (it won't even let the others start). That's not to mention viruses and other nasties. 800x600 is very low too.
For those of us who use DSLRs, 1-2 seconds is way too long. True enough, buffers help, but I wouldn't buy such a slow camera.
And lets be honest. Do you think that a 4 year old Dell motherboard is more easily replaced than an Apple board? Absolutely. It might be a socket 370, but even though they can't be found anymore new, you could find one locally same day for dirt cheap (used), or just buy any cheap Socket A system and CPU for not a whole lot (even less if used) - and it will work just fine with whatever OS you're using (just a matter of using proper drivers). One of the nice things is - I can get the parts within minutes if I need to, and still for little $.
While I can't say about G4's... Any 3 year old PC should be able to boot XP and use office just fine. It runs quite smoothly on a 600MHz box as long as you have enough ram (256MB+). In fact, I doubt a G4 would work anywhere near this fast.
I see very little use for a floppy as well. But when it comes to serial and parallel ports, lots of people still use them. I use them all the time. Ok, not ALL people need them, but to remove them all... They'd be selling a lot of controllers. Think printers (I'm not trading my laserjet for some cheap USB P.O.S.), networking gear, IR receivers (and various HTPC gear), X10 controllers, PIC/EPROM programmers (anything electronics...) There's a lot of uses for it still.
Aren't we waiting a long time for all this new technology to come out? I've been waiting to a BTX FF motherboard, socket 939 and with PCI-E on it. I'm starting to wonder if I won't be waiting 'till 2007 to be able to buy one. Is it just me, or all these nice and new things are just taking forever to show up?
I have to go against what most people say here... I had a not-so-old yet 80gb drive (like, a few days over warranty) fail on me lately. (was a Western Digital). It was my 2003 server, luckily, it was just used as the OS drive (and to store a couple other things) - one NTFS partition. I've tried knoppix, and it was of no help. Mind you most tools (ntfsdos pro, Win PE, ERDC, - the list is long). The only thing somehow that managed to read some stuff back was another Win 2003 box. By that, I mean that I managed to see what was on it (a couple HD transportstreams I had to put somewhere to make space), but not recover anything...