Since we know our supplies of fossil fuels are reaching depletion, has anyone actually tried calculating the total amount of future "damage" possible to do by burning all of what's feasibly left to use?
It seems to me that most of the people spreading fear of global warming trends are acting as if, without new legislation and drastic changes, we'll keep on creating this pollution indefinitely.
In reality, it seems to me that once gas prices rise to only another $2-3 per gallon (due to demand outstripping supply), the motivation will be there for some serious change anyway. The most likely alternatives for power generation are things like nuclear plants, and for cars, maybe hydrogen - which would nullify most of these concerns.
I have an on-site computer service/consulting business that happens to compete directly with GeekSquad and others of their type. Whenever I run into the user who "lost their installation discs", I simply explain all of their options to them - and let *them* decide how to proceed.
1. They can opt to do without me re-loading whatever software they don't have. They can try to do it themselves later when they find their discs, or make another appointment to come back and do it later. 2. If they provide me with copies and tell me they really did pay for the program(s) in question, it's not my job to second-guess them. I'm paid to do whatever computer-related tasks they request of me, plain and simple. 3. They can run out and buy the product while I'm doing the rest of the work on their machine. 4. If it's someone I know *really* well and there's a good understanding that "they have no idea where the program came from", I *might* be convinced to help a friend out and load a bootleg copy of some program for them. But officially, no - this isn't a practice you want to get caught up in. (The way I see it though, the user is still the one breaking the law if he/she doesn't buy a legit copy of whatever they begged me to install for them. I'm only moving the bits around from point A to B - and not actually *using* the software in question afterwards.)
A friend of mine (who shall remain anonymous) works for a very large news distribution and financial company, and they recently went through an *enormous* hassle when Microsoft decided to invalidate the old "volume license" key for XP that they previously used. (As part of the whole new "Windows validation" thing, etc. - they let the old corporate key "expire" when their licensing came up for renewal, and issued them a new one to use instead.)
All of a sudden, thousands of workstations around the globe were reporting errors about being unable to get Windows updates - and you can imagine the amount of work this created for I.T., rolling each and every PC over to use the new key!
I never did hear how it turned out - except I'm pretty sure they were big enough to apply some pressure on MS to re-activate their old key code, given the circumstances.
Sure, except I think in the short-term, you overestimate the amount of bandwidth the typical customer really has.
In my area, for example, you're finally seeing most people use some type of "broadband" connection vs. dial-up modem, *but*, they rarely buy more than the most basic package. Therefore, their download speeds are fine for email and web browsing, but still insufficient to download multi-gigabyte size games in a reasonable amount of time.
Meanwhile, new game titles just keep getting bigger and bigger. (I believe one of the brand new RTS game releases is over 8GB installed.) Not only that, but a requirement of authenticating (a la Steam) over the Internet is a real hassle for people trying to organize LAN gaming events. Just because you can secure a gym or cafeteria or other such facility to hold a gaming party doesn't mean they'll have a high-speed net connection everyone is welcome to borrow too.
The cries of "Walmart is killing America!" and so on are getting really tiresome. I don't care for their stores either, yet I've bought specific items there (such as baby diapers), because they simply had the best prices for the exact same products I would have paid more for elsewhere.
IMHO, if you don't like the quality of WalMart goods, don't buy any of their "house brand" stuff, or any of the generic stuff. Only buy when they sell the *identical* product you were wanting anyway from another store.
No matter how "evil" people think they are, they won't be able to successfully sell items the public won't buy. And they can only squeeze so hard, for so long, on manufacturers with successful products. (Of course, new ones needing a "jump start" into the marketplace want to kiss WalMart's butt. They have everything to gain when they're starting out at ground zero. But at some point, you simply can't afford to keep offering WalMart the quantities of product they want at the prices they demand you sell for. And hopefully by then, your product is well-known and in enough demand that you can cut WalMart off and keep sales alive through other retailers. Or even do direct marketing if need-be. The Internet is a powerful ally.)
I have, and continue to do so! I agree that right now, they seem to be the only party willing to take a stand that flies in the face of "bigger, more controlling government". Unfortunately, the L.P. really does need to "get their shit together". Right now, I generally find that when I explain their angle to people, they're intrigued by the ideas themselves - but ultimately hang onto their Republican or Democratic-voting ways.
In other words, the L.P. still feels too much like a "radical fringe" group, vs. a potentially viable presidential party. If you read up on them, you feel like all they're doing is desperately trying to get you to buy a few political books, a couple T-shirts that kick some funds back to the Cato Institute, and showing you a few links to news articles showing their last candidate getting forcibly kicked out of a presidential debate he wasn't ever invited to speak in, and hauled off in a police car.
I think quite a few intelligent voters are willing to listen to Libertarian-leaning ideas, and even to incorporate them into their thinking.... but that's a far cry from convincing them that casting a vote for a 3rd. party is the way to achieve them.
There's still a stongly ingrained mentality that voting for anything other than the "big 2" parties is simply throwing away your vote, since the others don't have the financial backing or level of organization and respect needed to come close to winning an election.
The last 4 companies I worked for still relied on at least 2 or 3 stand-alone paper fax machines, along with computerized fax solutions. Why?
Primarily, there's the "simplicity" factor. No matter how nice it might be to be able to fax anything from your PC that you could print to a printer, you've still got the complexity of the system itself to deal with. Larger companies use networked fax solutions like "LightningFax", where all the outgoing faxes get queued up on a server for delivery. If a dialing rule is incorrect on the server, it might spend all afternoon trying to dial a number without putting a required 1 on the front, or not using an area-code where one is needed for an "in state long-distance call", etc. Or as occasionally happens, the driver on the server might get hung, causing all the faxes to logjam, reporting that they're all "ready to send" - but the telephony card isn't making any calls out.
When your customer is waiting for a faxed quote, your salespeople want an immediate solution. Having that old stand-alone fax machine as a backup is the easiest way to solve their problem, while you troubleshoot the issue on the network fax package.
There's also the fact that sometimes, a fax needs to be sent (or received) by a visitor to your business. Are they going to be able to log in to one of your computers, know how to use the scanner to get their document into the computer (or know how to get a received one to their workstation to print)?
Yep -- no argument there. Trying to accomplish dual-boot using hardware instead of software was by far the more expensive method to use. But older processors? I don't know about that, really. I seem to recall you could get fairly "state of the art" CPUs on the 3rd. party cards sold by Orange and the like?
I'm still trying to figure out why my post was marked a "troll" though, really? I figured it was just a fact that many people either forgot about or maybe haven't been a Mac user long enough to remember. Personally, I'll be a bit surprised if Steve Jobs doesn't make some sort of mention of them during one of the future keynote speeches - when he tries to explain his change in direction to officially sanctioning running Microsoft's OS on his hardware.
Anyone remember the "PowerPC" Macs, with the ability to dual boot into MS-DOS or MacOS? They used to sell "PC Compatibility cards" that went in some of the PowerMacs, which were basically en entire PC on a card slot, complete with memory SIMMS, VGA video (output along-side the on-board Mac video output via a splitter cable), and even a PC joystick port.
To me, this whole thing is reminiscent of those days.
Well, it all depends on who you ask, I think. I pre-ordered a new MacBook Pro several weeks after they were announced at MacWorld, and after waiting about 30 days for mine, it arrived completely dead on arrival. I could plug in the power adapter and get the white light on the lid-release button to come on, but no sign of booting up when I pressed the power button. Tried resetting the PRAM and PMU and all that jazz.... no dice.
When I called to RMA it, Apple told me it would be at least 3-4 weeks before I'd receive another replacement for it. Needless to say, I wasn't pleased.
But a few days before mine finally arrived, I heard numerous rumors of Apple putting a temporary freeze on MacBook Pro shipments, because they were investigating the defects (rumored to all revolve around the motherboard) and trying to ship fixed versions. When mine did arrive, it was absolutely trouble-free. No whine noises or display flicker or random shutdown issues, or even one speaker quieter/more distorted than the other.
Out of curiousity, I also visited my local Apple Store and looked at about 6 different MacBook Pros they had on display. Couldn't see a single issue on any of those either - and that was long before this new "revision D" change.
So sure, there were some flaws in at least some of the initial production runs, but I don't think this is anything like the iBook logic board disaster that caused iBooks to die outside the normal warranty period in most cases, and which Apple had much less motivation to correct.
As other people said, if you have spreadsheets *that* large, you're probably using the wrong tool for the job in the first place.
This is *so* often the problem with the Microsoft Office suite, in general, though. It is often one of the only applications installed on a corporate PC - so folks try to make it do everything they need done, rather than research and fight for funding for a more appropriate product.
EG. MS Access - really a database product only suitable for prototyping basic concepts, or "beginner level" stuff that's not critical if it gets damaged or lost (a database of your movie collection at home, for example?). Yet, companies try to build mission-critical multi-user sales and contact databases with it all the time, and end up with huge headaches when it gets corrupted or disappears all of a sudden. MS Outlook - Maturing into a very nice email package and scheduler/contact list, yet Exchange Server admins everywhere have to disable functionality or restrict mailbox sizes just to keep users from the tendency to use it as a "filing cabinet" for every document and picture they ever receive. And as you illustrated, MS Excel, mis-used for everything from a desktop publishing tool to a database substitute. Even MS Word gets mis-used as a graphics editor/conversion tool, in environments where people don't have a suitable graphics package installed! I'd say Powerpoint may be their only app that keeps its users pretty focused on only doing tasks it's intended for.
Not only does Apple shortchange everyone on RAM, but it's triply insulting for 2 extra reasons! First, buying more from Apple is always at least 2x the price anyone else charges for the same memory sticks (and half the time, the original Apple RAM isn't even considered as "top tier" as some of the 3rd. party alternatives you can use!). And second, Macs have always been notorious for getting significant performance improvements with more RAM, to the point of maxxing them out in most cases. (Maybe not in the case of the PowerMac G5 where you can go up to 8GB - but in almost everything else they've ever sold.) Windows PCs, by contrast, have barely even felt faster or made much real use of RAM upgrades over 512MB until very recently. Even now, 1GB is usually the "sweet spot" for your typical XP gaming system.
Actually, you might have the wrong BBS in mind? I don't think my incident was ever publicized on TV news. It's possible, but not that I was ever aware of. You might be thinking of the Offworld BBS, which was also involved in an FBI seizure around the same timeframe? I think in that case, it had to do with complaints of the sysop being involved in child porn.
Not very long ago, I applied for a job doing computer support for a local community college. Everything went well, despite it being a rather "trying" experience, with multiple application forms to fill out, a couple of fairly extensive interviews and a hands-on proficiency test - but in the end, I was verbally offered a position. Then, 2 days later, I got another phone call, informing me that my hiring was being "put on hold" due to some new information that had come to light.
What happened was, I used to run a very popular computer bulletin board system. Almost 10 years ago, it was seized by the FBI under suspicion of copyright infringements occuring on it. After all of my equipment was held hostage for *2 years*, they decided to drop the whole case and give me everything back. A rather sheepish-faced federal agent actually came by my house after work with his station wagon filled up with all of my CDs, computers, monitors, etc. etc. and dropped it all over in my living room - apologizing for the whole incident (but still making me sign some type of waiver promising to absolve them of all responsibility, so I couldn't sue later). I thought this story was worthy of mention on my web site, since to this day, people occasionally ask me what ever happened to the BBS, etc. etc.
Well, the college apparently googled my name, found my web site, and read everything on it. (My BBS story wasn't exactly "top level" material on my site, so they had to click through at least 2 levels of menus and read 4 pages about it before they hit that part.) They were concerned about the incident, despite no charges ever being filed - and denied me employment based on it! (Only 2 days after the phone call telling me they were "reconsidering" hiring me, I got the standard rejection form letter in the mail, signed by the very guy I had just spoken to on the phone!)
Extremely irritating - because while, sure, I could just censor this info - I think it's a story worth telling. And furthermore, I'm not so sure I want to work for an employer who is that paranoid over something that speaks more about government's inefficiency and blundering than my own character.
But in the end, I was hired as I.T. Supervisor of a business paying considerably more than this community college anyway, so maybe everything happens for a reason after all.
Exactly! I've heard similar complaints from a friend of mine who works for Xerox, another who used to work for MCI Worldcom, and several others. In each case, it came down to the same core problem. Management went with a "lowest bid" contracted I.T. workforce as a package deal with some consulting firm, and got exactly what they paid for, or they bought way too far into the idea that it was a good "value" to hire a lot of "entry level" workers for cheap. That one usually fails because management assumes their more senior staff can train them on the job to "get them up to speed". In reality, the more senior folks feel they're being asked to perform an additional job function (tutor/personal trainer) without any additional compensation - so they don't do a whole lot of training. To compound that problem, they tend to withhold information because giving away all of their "tricks of the trade" lessens their value in the organization.
Problems like running out of storage space *may* also be due to the money not being there to buy more equipment... BUT, it is more often due to bad decision-making on software solutions. EG. A business decides to try to go to a "paperless office" with document management software. All of a sudden, large TIFF files are filling up the server space left and right. In reality, they might have been FAR better off just leaving a lot of that content on paper. In cases like these, you *could* throw money at the problem, but you could also plan it more sensibly in advance. Maybe there are really only a few types of documents anyone will care about searching for and pulling back up for retreival later?
Well, truthfully, it's exceedingly rare that consumers completely lose out on a useful feature or service as a result of a patent dispute. (Can anyone even recall a single instance of this?) Every time it happens, it seems like more of a money-grab. (EG. EBay ends up in a settlement agreement of some sort where they pay out millions of dollars in fees, but get to keep the "Buy It Now" feature - perhaps with an offer to pay a percentage of the money earned on all future "Buy It Now" sales to the other party.)
You just saw a similar thing happen with the whole Blackberry PDA thing.... There was all the fear about the devices being rendered useless/obsolete once they lose their lawsuit over the patents - but $615 million in settlement payments later, they're back to "business as usual".
The bad part for consumers, though, is we're surely absorbing all of those settlement fees in the way of higher prices charged for the services we use. IMHO, eBay already charges way too much. Their recent price increases might have been a pre-emptive measure to offset losses they were already expecting to take over the "Buy It Now" dispute?
This is actually playing out exactly as I predicted. Microsoft isn't going to make it easy to boot any of their OS's on a MacBook Pro or any other Intel-based Mac, because doing so would mean the slow "death by irrelevance" of their VirtualPC product they bought from Connectix a few years ago.
The beauty of forcing a Mac user to run Windows through the VirtualPC product is Microsoft can sell them a legal software license bundled with the product, making it an easy "one stop" way to collect the entire revenue stream. If they simply coded booting support for EFI on MacBooks into Vista, they'd encourage a lot more piracy. (How many Mac users do you know who despise Microsoft - and would justify running a bootleg copy of Vista in dual-boot mode as "So what? It's not really my primary OS anyway, and Microsoft doesn't need to get any more of MY money!"?)
On the flip-side, the next version of VirtualPC will be able to completely drop all the x86 emulation code, and simply become a "sandbox" that fools a Windows OS into booting up inside of it, and then passes all the x86 instructions to the Intel-based Mac's CPU natively. This will let them brag about the incredible performance boost in the latest version of VirtualPC, etc. etc.
The only thing I'm not sure about is if MS will decide to simply drop support for PPC based Macs at some point, keep both VirtualPC 7 and this new "version 8?" version as branded for "Intel Macs only", or actually code all of it together, so the traditional PPC emulation stuff is automatically installed/used where needed, and the alternate code for Intel-based Macs used where possible?
But I'd practically bet money on one of these scenarios panning out.
Yeah... I've been running KnoppMyth for quite some time now. I had a lot of headaches with a few older versions. My system kept wanting to randomly freeze up or crash.... but the R5A16 version, I've been running for months now with absolutely no problems.
My single biggest complaint about MythTV is getting it configured to properly display on a given TV set without overscanning or underscanning too much. For example, I've got an RCA 52" rear-projection TV and have Knoppmyth connected to it through its DVI connector. Apparently though, RCA deliberately adds a lot of overscan to any signal coming in through that connector, because they really only intended it for use with one of their companion HD TV tuner boxes, which is correspondingly designed to send out a relatively underscanned signal.
They tell you to make use of options in the X configuration file (such as adding a value between 0 and 1 to the "TVOverscan =" line), or getting modeline info for your particular set by temporarily connecting a Windows-based PC and using a utility that can probe it and give you exact values. But let's face it... neither of these options is at all "user friendly" or even practical.
In my case, the changes I made to the TVOVerscan parameter appeared to make no difference at all (maybe because they don't affect the DVI video output?). I finally had to "cheat" and go into a secret "service menu" on my TV, telling it to do some underscanning of all incoming signals to get Myth's screens to properly fill the screen but not get cut off at the edges. That's fine, except if I switch to a different input selection (as I would to use my VCR), the scanning is all screwed up for those other devices!
No, you're absolutely right. SCSI *was* a much better transfer method for moving sample data on and off of samplers/sampling synths, but it wasn't always an option. The Roland S-50 certainly didn't offer it. I believe SampleVision did support SCSI transfers in cases where it was available though.
You also have to realize that samples were much smaller in those days. The typical sampler was running the equivalent of an Intel 286 series CPU - and your storage media only held 720K per diskette, including the data telling it which range of keys to assign samples to, etc.
The music industry is notoriously "closed mouthed" about letting anyone know how their electronic products work at a technical level. Ever since the mid 80's or so though, companies have been reverse-engineering these instruments and devices, and *selling* commercial products that work with them, not to mention work on freeware projects along the same lines.
For example, I used to own a Roland S-50 sampling synthesizer. It saved its sample data on 720K 3.5" floppy disks. But people with PCs quickly realized it would be much more useful if you could take standard WAV sound files and dump them into the synth via MIDI. Many other makes and models of sampling synths and rack-mounted samplers were in the same boat. The manufacturers (like Roland) had poor documentation for the MIDI "system exclusive" commands that would be required to upload or download the sample data, so a few people worked at reverse engineering all of this on their own. Eventually, prodcuts were sold like "SampleVision" which knew how to do this for many dozens of samplers on the market.
Rather than being sued, it seemed like the synth makers actually ended up endorsing the products, providing links to them from their own web sites - because they learned it made their products more desirable to purchase.
Yeah, and if anything, I thought the single most unique/interesting thing about that new Apple leather iPod case was something they overlooked in the product announcement. It appears from the Apple Store photos and info that they actually have a little "tongue" that you pull on to slide the iPod up and partially out of the case whenever you need to peek at the screen on it. (The biggest initial complaint I heard about their leather case was "It doesn't even have a window in it to view the display!")
I sure wouldn't spend that kind of money on an iPod carrying case -- but cases are a big deal to a lot of folks. Look at the killing the cellphone industry makes on cases. And the fact that it solves the dilemma of "How do you protect the iPod screen and still make it convenient enough to glance at it when needed?" is at least worth noting.
Actually, weren't ISDN customers fooling ANI in the past, because the service essentially jacks your circuit directly in to the telco switch? I seem to recall people spoofing caller ID info by feeding false ANI data through one of the carrier "D" channels on ISDN?
I certainly remember Altavista, as for a long time, it was practically the only search engine I ever used. I bookmarked it as the start page on quite a few other people's browsers too.
I think the difference, this time, will be - Google still works extremely well, with no signs of the company resting on its laurels. I kept using Altavista out of habit long after new alternatives emerged, but I only quit when it became obvious they weren't really competitive anymore. The last thing I recall coming out of Altavista was a push to resell the engine as something you could run locally on a LAN/WAN network to index your own Intranets. In hindsight, they probably wasted their time trying to do that at a point when they needed to focus on keeping up with what the competition was offering instead.
My question: How can they really say this? I get the idea lots of places are still recommending Thinkpads because traditonally, they have done so and been pleased with their quality and ruggedness. But all of that was before IBM sold out to Lenovo. Now, they're being mass produced in China for the first time, and all I've seen from *any* laptop assembled in China is a worse than average level of quality control.
In fact, Apple's new MacBook Pro marks the first time one of their machines has been assembled in China, and reports are already trickling in with issues like integrated iSight cameras that aren't functioning, a "known issue" according to Apple where some units report no battery is connected even when it is installed and charged, and in my own case, a MacBook Pro that just arrived on my doorstep, direct from Shanghai, completely dead on arrival. Still others report problems with audio distortion out of the right speaker, overall poor volume levels compared to previous generation Powerbooks, and a high-pitched whine from the LCD panels.
Opting for Chinese assembly seems to me like a good recipe for a drop in overall quality, no matter how respected your initial design may be.
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Since we know our supplies of fossil fuels are reaching depletion, has anyone actually tried calculating the total amount of future "damage" possible to do by burning all of what's feasibly left to use?
It seems to me that most of the people spreading fear of global warming trends are acting as if, without new legislation and drastic changes, we'll keep on creating this pollution indefinitely.
In reality, it seems to me that once gas prices rise to only another $2-3 per gallon (due to demand outstripping supply), the motivation will be there for some serious change anyway. The most likely alternatives for power generation are things like nuclear plants, and for cars, maybe hydrogen - which would nullify most of these concerns.
I have an on-site computer service/consulting business that happens to compete directly with GeekSquad and others of their type. Whenever I run into the user who "lost their installation discs", I simply explain all of their options to them - and let *them* decide how to proceed.
1. They can opt to do without me re-loading whatever software they don't have. They can try to do it themselves later when they find their discs, or make another appointment to come back and do it later.
2. If they provide me with copies and tell me they really did pay for the program(s) in question, it's not my job to second-guess them. I'm paid to do whatever computer-related tasks they request of me, plain and simple.
3. They can run out and buy the product while I'm doing the rest of the work on their machine.
4. If it's someone I know *really* well and there's a good understanding that "they have no idea where the program came from", I *might* be convinced to help a friend out and load a bootleg copy of some program for them. But officially, no - this isn't a practice you want to get caught up in. (The way I see it though, the user is still the one breaking the law if he/she doesn't buy a legit copy of whatever they begged me to install for them. I'm only moving the bits around from point A to B - and not actually *using* the software in question afterwards.)
A friend of mine (who shall remain anonymous) works for a very large news distribution and financial company, and they recently went through an *enormous* hassle when Microsoft decided to invalidate the old "volume license" key for XP that they previously used. (As part of the whole new "Windows validation" thing, etc. - they let the old corporate key "expire" when their licensing came up for renewal, and issued them a new one to use instead.)
All of a sudden, thousands of workstations around the globe were reporting errors about being unable to get Windows updates - and you can imagine the amount of work this created for I.T., rolling each and every PC over to use the new key!
I never did hear how it turned out - except I'm pretty sure they were big enough to apply some pressure on MS to re-activate their old key code, given the circumstances.
Sure, except I think in the short-term, you overestimate the amount of bandwidth the typical customer really has.
In my area, for example, you're finally seeing most people use some type of "broadband" connection vs. dial-up modem, *but*, they rarely buy more than the most basic package. Therefore, their download speeds are fine for email and web browsing, but still insufficient to download multi-gigabyte size games in a reasonable amount of time.
Meanwhile, new game titles just keep getting bigger and bigger. (I believe one of the brand new RTS game releases is over 8GB installed.) Not only that, but a requirement of authenticating (a la Steam) over the Internet is a real hassle for people trying to organize LAN gaming events. Just because you can secure a gym or cafeteria or other such facility to hold a gaming party doesn't mean they'll have a high-speed net connection everyone is welcome to borrow too.
The cries of "Walmart is killing America!" and so on are getting really tiresome. I don't care for their stores either, yet I've bought specific items there (such as baby diapers), because they simply had the best prices for the exact same products I would have paid more for elsewhere.
IMHO, if you don't like the quality of WalMart goods, don't buy any of their "house brand" stuff, or any of the generic stuff. Only buy when they sell the *identical* product you were wanting anyway from another store.
No matter how "evil" people think they are, they won't be able to successfully sell items the public won't buy. And they can only squeeze so hard, for so long, on manufacturers with successful products. (Of course, new ones needing a "jump start" into the marketplace want to kiss WalMart's butt. They have everything to gain when they're starting out at ground zero. But at some point, you simply can't afford to keep offering WalMart the quantities of product they want at the prices they demand you sell for. And hopefully by then, your product is well-known and in enough demand that you can cut WalMart off and keep sales alive through other retailers. Or even do direct marketing if need-be. The Internet is a powerful ally.)
I have, and continue to do so! I agree that right now, they seem to be the only party willing to take a stand that flies in the face of "bigger, more controlling government". Unfortunately, the L.P. really does need to "get their shit together". Right now, I generally find that when I explain their angle to people, they're intrigued by the ideas themselves - but ultimately hang onto their Republican or Democratic-voting ways.
In other words, the L.P. still feels too much like a "radical fringe" group, vs. a potentially viable presidential party. If you read up on them, you feel like all they're doing is desperately trying to get you to buy a few political books, a couple T-shirts that kick some funds back to the Cato Institute, and showing you a few links to news articles showing their last candidate getting forcibly kicked out of a presidential debate he wasn't ever invited to speak in, and hauled off in a police car.
I think quite a few intelligent voters are willing to listen to Libertarian-leaning ideas, and even to incorporate them into their thinking.... but that's a far cry from convincing them that casting a vote for a 3rd. party is the way to achieve them.
There's still a stongly ingrained mentality that voting for anything other than the "big 2" parties is simply throwing away your vote, since the others don't have the financial backing or level of organization and respect needed to come close to winning an election.
The last 4 companies I worked for still relied on at least 2 or 3 stand-alone paper fax machines, along with computerized fax solutions. Why?
Primarily, there's the "simplicity" factor. No matter how nice it might be to be able to fax anything from your PC that you could print to a printer, you've still got the complexity of the system itself to deal with. Larger companies use networked fax solutions like "LightningFax", where all the outgoing faxes get queued up on a server for delivery. If a dialing rule is incorrect on the server, it might spend all afternoon trying to dial a number without putting a required 1 on the front, or not using an area-code where one is needed for an "in state long-distance call", etc. Or as occasionally happens, the driver on the server might get hung, causing all the faxes to logjam, reporting that they're all "ready to send" - but the telephony card isn't making any calls out.
When your customer is waiting for a faxed quote, your salespeople want an immediate solution. Having that old stand-alone fax machine as a backup is the easiest way to solve their problem, while you troubleshoot the issue on the network fax package.
There's also the fact that sometimes, a fax needs to be sent (or received) by a visitor to your business. Are they going to be able to log in to one of your computers, know how to use the scanner to get their document into the computer (or know how to get a received one to their workstation to print)?
Yep -- no argument there. Trying to accomplish dual-boot using hardware instead of software was by far the more expensive method to use. But older processors? I don't know about that, really. I seem to recall you could get fairly "state of the art" CPUs on the 3rd. party cards sold by Orange and the like?
I'm still trying to figure out why my post was marked a "troll" though, really? I figured it was just a fact that many people either forgot about or maybe haven't been a Mac user long enough to remember. Personally, I'll be a bit surprised if Steve Jobs doesn't make some sort of mention of them during one of the future keynote speeches - when he tries to explain his change in direction to officially sanctioning running Microsoft's OS on his hardware.
Anyone remember the "PowerPC" Macs, with the ability to dual boot into MS-DOS or MacOS? They used to sell "PC Compatibility cards" that went in some of the PowerMacs, which were basically en entire PC on a card slot, complete with memory SIMMS, VGA video (output along-side the on-board Mac video output via a splitter cable), and even a PC joystick port.
To me, this whole thing is reminiscent of those days.
Well, it all depends on who you ask, I think. I pre-ordered a new MacBook Pro several weeks after they were announced at MacWorld, and after waiting about 30 days for mine, it arrived completely dead on arrival. I could plug in the power adapter and get the white light on the lid-release button to come on, but no sign of booting up when I pressed the power button. Tried resetting the PRAM and PMU and all that jazz.... no dice.
When I called to RMA it, Apple told me it would be at least 3-4 weeks before I'd receive another replacement for it. Needless to say, I wasn't pleased.
But a few days before mine finally arrived, I heard numerous rumors of Apple putting a temporary freeze on MacBook Pro shipments, because they were investigating the defects (rumored to all revolve around the motherboard) and trying to ship fixed versions. When mine did arrive, it was absolutely trouble-free. No whine noises or display flicker or random shutdown issues, or even one speaker quieter/more distorted than the other.
Out of curiousity, I also visited my local Apple Store and looked at about 6 different MacBook Pros they had on display. Couldn't see a single issue on any of those either - and that was long before this new "revision D" change.
So sure, there were some flaws in at least some of the initial production runs, but I don't think this is anything like the iBook logic board disaster that caused iBooks to die outside the normal warranty period in most cases, and which Apple had much less motivation to correct.
As other people said, if you have spreadsheets *that* large, you're probably using the wrong tool for the job in the first place.
This is *so* often the problem with the Microsoft Office suite, in general, though. It is often one of the only applications installed on a corporate PC - so folks try to make it do everything they need done, rather than research and fight for funding for a more appropriate product.
EG. MS Access - really a database product only suitable for prototyping basic concepts, or "beginner level" stuff that's not critical if it gets damaged or lost (a database of your movie collection at home, for example?). Yet, companies try to build mission-critical multi-user sales and contact databases with it all the time, and end up with huge headaches when it gets corrupted or disappears all of a sudden. MS Outlook - Maturing into a very nice email package and scheduler/contact list, yet Exchange Server admins everywhere have to disable functionality or restrict mailbox sizes just to keep users from the tendency to use it as a "filing cabinet" for every document and picture they ever receive. And as you illustrated, MS Excel, mis-used for everything from a desktop publishing tool to a database substitute. Even MS Word gets mis-used as a graphics editor/conversion tool, in environments where people don't have a suitable graphics package installed! I'd say Powerpoint may be their only app that keeps its users pretty focused on only doing tasks it's intended for.
Not only does Apple shortchange everyone on RAM, but it's triply insulting for 2 extra reasons! First, buying more from Apple is always at least 2x the price anyone else charges for the same memory sticks (and half the time, the original Apple RAM isn't even considered as "top tier" as some of the 3rd. party alternatives you can use!). And second, Macs have always been notorious for getting significant performance improvements with more RAM, to the point of maxxing them out in most cases. (Maybe not in the case of the PowerMac G5 where you can go up to 8GB - but in almost everything else they've ever sold.) Windows PCs, by contrast, have barely even felt faster or made much real use of RAM upgrades over 512MB until very recently. Even now, 1GB is usually the "sweet spot" for your typical XP gaming system.
Actually, you might have the wrong BBS in mind? I don't think my incident was ever publicized on TV news. It's possible, but not that I was ever aware of. You might be thinking of the Offworld BBS, which was also involved in an FBI seizure around the same timeframe? I think in that case, it had to do with complaints of the sysop being involved in child porn.
Not very long ago, I applied for a job doing computer support for a local community college. Everything went well, despite it being a rather "trying" experience, with multiple application forms to fill out, a couple of fairly extensive interviews and a hands-on proficiency test - but in the end, I was verbally offered a position. Then, 2 days later, I got another phone call, informing me that my hiring was being "put on hold" due to some new information that had come to light.
What happened was, I used to run a very popular computer bulletin board system. Almost 10 years ago, it was seized by the FBI under suspicion of copyright infringements occuring on it. After all of my equipment was held hostage for *2 years*, they decided to drop the whole case and give me everything back. A rather sheepish-faced federal agent actually came by my house after work with his station wagon filled up with all of my CDs, computers, monitors, etc. etc. and dropped it all over in my living room - apologizing for the whole incident (but still making me sign some type of waiver promising to absolve them of all responsibility, so I couldn't sue later). I thought this story was worthy of mention on my web site, since to this day, people occasionally ask me what ever happened to the BBS, etc. etc.
Well, the college apparently googled my name, found my web site, and read everything on it. (My BBS story wasn't exactly "top level" material on my site, so they had to click through at least 2 levels of menus and read 4 pages about it before they hit that part.) They were concerned about the incident, despite no charges ever being filed - and denied me employment based on it! (Only 2 days after the phone call telling me they were "reconsidering" hiring me, I got the standard rejection form letter in the mail, signed by the very guy I had just spoken to on the phone!)
Extremely irritating - because while, sure, I could just censor this info - I think it's a story worth telling. And furthermore, I'm not so sure I want to work for an employer who is that paranoid over something that speaks more about government's inefficiency and blundering than my own character.
But in the end, I was hired as I.T. Supervisor of a business paying considerably more than this community college anyway, so maybe everything happens for a reason after all.
Exactly! I've heard similar complaints from a friend of mine who works for Xerox, another who used to work for MCI Worldcom, and several others. In each case, it came down to the same core problem. Management went with a "lowest bid" contracted I.T. workforce as a package deal with some consulting firm, and got exactly what they paid for, or they bought way too far into the idea that it was a good "value" to hire a lot of "entry level" workers for cheap. That one usually fails because management assumes their more senior staff can train them on the job to "get them up to speed". In reality, the more senior folks feel they're being asked to perform an additional job function (tutor/personal trainer) without any additional compensation - so they don't do a whole lot of training. To compound that problem, they tend to withhold information because giving away all of their "tricks of the trade" lessens their value in the organization.
... BUT, it is more often due to bad decision-making on software solutions. EG. A business decides to try to go to a "paperless office" with document management software. All of a sudden, large TIFF files are filling up the server space left and right. In reality, they might have been FAR better off just leaving a lot of that content on paper. In cases like these, you *could* throw money at the problem, but you could also plan it more sensibly in advance. Maybe there are really only a few types of documents anyone will care about searching for and pulling back up for retreival later?
Problems like running out of storage space *may* also be due to the money not being there to buy more equipment
Well, truthfully, it's exceedingly rare that consumers completely lose out on a useful feature or service as a result of a patent dispute. (Can anyone even recall a single instance of this?) Every time it happens, it seems like more of a money-grab. (EG. EBay ends up in a settlement agreement of some sort where they pay out millions of dollars in fees, but get to keep the "Buy It Now" feature - perhaps with an offer to pay a percentage of the money earned on all future "Buy It Now" sales to the other party.)
You just saw a similar thing happen with the whole Blackberry PDA thing.... There was all the fear about the devices being rendered useless/obsolete once they lose their lawsuit over the patents - but $615 million in settlement payments later, they're back to "business as usual".
The bad part for consumers, though, is we're surely absorbing all of those settlement fees in the way of higher prices charged for the services we use. IMHO, eBay already charges way too much. Their recent price increases might have been a pre-emptive measure to offset losses they were already expecting to take over the "Buy It Now" dispute?
This is actually playing out exactly as I predicted. Microsoft isn't going to make it easy to boot any of their OS's on a MacBook Pro or any other Intel-based Mac, because doing so would mean the slow "death by irrelevance" of their VirtualPC product they bought from Connectix a few years ago.
The beauty of forcing a Mac user to run Windows through the VirtualPC product is Microsoft can sell them a legal software license bundled with the product, making it an easy "one stop" way to collect the entire revenue stream. If they simply coded booting support for EFI on MacBooks into Vista, they'd encourage a lot more piracy. (How many Mac users do you know who despise Microsoft - and would justify running a bootleg copy of Vista in dual-boot mode as "So what? It's not really my primary OS anyway, and Microsoft doesn't need to get any more of MY money!"?)
On the flip-side, the next version of VirtualPC will be able to completely drop all the x86 emulation code, and simply become a "sandbox" that fools a Windows OS into booting up inside of it, and then passes all the x86 instructions to the Intel-based Mac's CPU natively. This will let them brag about the incredible performance boost in the latest version of VirtualPC, etc. etc.
The only thing I'm not sure about is if MS will decide to simply drop support for PPC based Macs at some point, keep both VirtualPC 7 and this new "version 8?" version as branded for "Intel Macs only", or actually code all of it together, so the traditional PPC emulation stuff is automatically installed/used where needed, and the alternate code for Intel-based Macs used where possible?
But I'd practically bet money on one of these scenarios panning out.
Yeah... I've been running KnoppMyth for quite some time now. I had a lot of headaches with a few older versions. My system kept wanting to randomly freeze up or crash .... but the R5A16 version, I've been running for months now with absolutely no problems.
... neither of these options is at all "user friendly" or even practical.
My single biggest complaint about MythTV is getting it configured to properly display on a given TV set without overscanning or underscanning too much. For example, I've got an RCA 52" rear-projection TV and have Knoppmyth connected to it through its DVI connector. Apparently though, RCA deliberately adds a lot of overscan to any signal coming in through that connector, because they really only intended it for use with one of their companion HD TV tuner boxes, which is correspondingly designed to send out a relatively underscanned signal.
They tell you to make use of options in the X configuration file (such as adding a value between 0 and 1 to the "TVOverscan =" line), or getting modeline info for your particular set by temporarily connecting a Windows-based PC and using a utility that can probe it and give you exact values. But let's face it
In my case, the changes I made to the TVOVerscan parameter appeared to make no difference at all (maybe because they don't affect the DVI video output?). I finally had to "cheat" and go into a secret "service menu" on my TV, telling it to do some underscanning of all incoming signals to get Myth's screens to properly fill the screen but not get cut off at the edges. That's fine, except if I switch to a different input selection (as I would to use my VCR), the scanning is all screwed up for those other devices!
No, you're absolutely right. SCSI *was* a much better transfer method for moving sample data on and off of samplers/sampling synths, but it wasn't always an option. The Roland S-50 certainly didn't offer it. I believe SampleVision did support SCSI transfers in cases where it was available though.
You also have to realize that samples were much smaller in those days. The typical sampler was running the equivalent of an Intel 286 series CPU - and your storage media only held 720K per diskette, including the data telling it which range of keys to assign samples to, etc.
The music industry is notoriously "closed mouthed" about letting anyone know how their electronic products work at a technical level. Ever since the mid 80's or so though, companies have been reverse-engineering these instruments and devices, and *selling* commercial products that work with them, not to mention work on freeware projects along the same lines.
For example, I used to own a Roland S-50 sampling synthesizer. It saved its sample data on 720K 3.5" floppy disks. But people with PCs quickly realized it would be much more useful if you could take standard WAV sound files and dump them into the synth via MIDI. Many other makes and models of sampling synths and rack-mounted samplers were in the same boat. The manufacturers (like Roland) had poor documentation for the MIDI "system exclusive" commands that would be required to upload or download the sample data, so a few people worked at reverse engineering all of this on their own. Eventually, prodcuts were sold like "SampleVision" which knew how to do this for many dozens of samplers on the market.
Rather than being sued, it seemed like the synth makers actually ended up endorsing the products, providing links to them from their own web sites - because they learned it made their products more desirable to purchase.
Yeah, and if anything, I thought the single most unique/interesting thing about that new Apple leather iPod case was something they overlooked in the product announcement. It appears from the Apple Store photos and info that they actually have a little "tongue" that you pull on to slide the iPod up and partially out of the case whenever you need to peek at the screen on it. (The biggest initial complaint I heard about their leather case was "It doesn't even have a window in it to view the display!")
I sure wouldn't spend that kind of money on an iPod carrying case -- but cases are a big deal to a lot of folks. Look at the killing the cellphone industry makes on cases. And the fact that it solves the dilemma of "How do you protect the iPod screen and still make it convenient enough to glance at it when needed?" is at least worth noting.
You mean like Saudi Arabia owning a controlling interest in Citicorp/Citibank?
Actually, weren't ISDN customers fooling ANI in the past, because the service essentially jacks your circuit directly in to the telco switch? I seem to recall people spoofing caller ID info by feeding false ANI data through one of the carrier "D" channels on ISDN?
I certainly remember Altavista, as for a long time, it was practically the only search engine I ever used. I bookmarked it as the start page on quite a few other people's browsers too.
I think the difference, this time, will be - Google still works extremely well, with no signs of the company resting on its laurels. I kept using Altavista out of habit long after new alternatives emerged, but I only quit when it became obvious they weren't really competitive anymore. The last thing I recall coming out of Altavista was a push to resell the engine as something you could run locally on a LAN/WAN network to index your own Intranets. In hindsight, they probably wasted their time trying to do that at a point when they needed to focus on keeping up with what the competition was offering instead.
My question: How can they really say this? I get the idea lots of places are still recommending Thinkpads because traditonally, they have done so and been pleased with their quality and ruggedness. But all of that was before IBM sold out to Lenovo. Now, they're being mass produced in China for the first time, and all I've seen from *any* laptop assembled in China is a worse than average level of quality control.
In fact, Apple's new MacBook Pro marks the first time one of their machines has been assembled in China, and reports are already trickling in with issues like integrated iSight cameras that aren't functioning, a "known issue" according to Apple where some units report no battery is connected even when it is installed and charged, and in my own case, a MacBook Pro that just arrived on my doorstep, direct from Shanghai, completely dead on arrival. Still others report problems with audio distortion out of the right speaker, overall poor volume levels compared to previous generation Powerbooks, and a high-pitched whine from the LCD panels.
Opting for Chinese assembly seems to me like a good recipe for a drop in overall quality, no matter how respected your initial design may be.