My parents still have a 2004 Dell with Windows XP, Service Pack 0, that hasn't had a single issue since they bought it. I've got a four year old Dell laptop that's still running fine on Vista, again no upgrades, and the only problem it's ever had was a motherboard that needed replaced within the first year. Hell I've got a ~1996 Gateway and 1999 Compaq that are still running like the day they were purchased! The MacBook I understand, but who the hell did you buy these XP machines from? What are they, eMachines?
when something goes wrong, I can take it to a human, point out exactly what's wrong, and say, "Fix it" rather than play phone and shipping tag with some contracted-out support company.... (1 hour of my time, vs. 2-3 months getting the run-around with Toshiba for my wife's previous laptop; there's a brand I'll never touch again).
Well there's your problem -- Toshiba. When the motherboard on my last Dell died a couple years back, I called their phone support and was off the phone in less than 20 minutes, and from the time I called them to the time they mailed me a box, I mailed back my laptop, they replaced the motherboard, and mailed it right back to me...that all took one week. And shit I could have bought TWO of those laptops for the price of a mac and had a spare to use for that week...as it was I had a spare anyway, because I snagged my brother's old Dell and slapped the hard drive into that.
Yea, I have Linux as my default and prefer Linux as my default because 99.9% of the time that's what I want it to boot into. It's just obnoxious that it takes two or three reboots sometimes to install an update on Windows (Shut it down, on boot it reboots again, then sometimes it will still have things to install and pop up a window saying it's going to reboot AGAIN and there's not a damn thing you can do about it), when I can update my entire system on Linux with at worst one.
Never had a single crash on Linux on this laptop. Hell my old WinXP machine that I used to use for gaming was crashing at least once a week when I left it on Windows, but never saw a single crash that I can recall on Linux.
My first assumption on any kind of frequent crash is almost always hardware failure. And I used to build my own PCs from the cheapest parts I could find ($20 video cards, the half price RAM that gets shipped from Taiwan...) so I have plenty of experience with bad RAM. But when a Linux system won't crash under heavy load, and a Windows system will crash while idle, and they're on the exact same hard drive and the exact same system, hardware failure seems a bit less likely...
Not to mention all the times I hit to boot Win7, walk away for a minute, and come back to see the Linux login prompt. Damn thing can't even get to the login prompt without spontaneously rebooting! And that's not a rare event, that's AT LEAST three quarters of the times I try to boot Windows!
I believe since WinXP (at least ON WinXP) Microsoft by default sets the OS so it doesn't show a BSOD -- it just reboots spontaneously. I don't run Windows anymore, but once I re-enabled the BSOD I used to get them on a damn near daily basis with XP. On the few times I've booted to Win7 on my new laptop (Damn Adobe products...), I'd say I've gotten one mysterious reboot out of around 10 hours spent running the OS.
You don't live in America, clearly. Over here, most programmers are on salary. You work a minimum of 8 hours a day, a maximum of whatever they tell you, and you get paid a certain amount per year to do that. No such thing as 'overtime'. Christ in my company they _brag_ about that time where everyone was pulling 12-16 hour days, and working weekends, for an entire month. No extra pay. (Though they apparently didn't do a damn thing for a month or two prior)
Let's look at this another way. Government workers are employees of all taxpaying citizens. That's what a Republic is. If the IT department discovers an employee is watching porn at work, he should probably report it to their manager or to HR. That's what Assange is doing. The government has no more right to keep their actions secret from the citizens than you have to keep what you're doing at work secret from your boss.
The pound avoirdupois, which forms the basis of the U.S. customary system of mass, is defined as exactly 453.59237 grams by agreement between the U.S., the U.K. and other English-speaking countries in 1959. Other units of mass are defined in terms of it.
The avoirdupois pound is legally defined as a measure of mass[15], but the name pound is also applied to measures of force. For instance, in many contexts, the pound avoirdupois is used as a unit of mass, but in some contexts, the term "pound" is used to refer to "pound-force". The slug is another unit of mass derived from pound-force.
Please get out of Linux, it's for serious people only.
"Note that nobody reads every post in linux-kernel. In fact, nobody who expects to have time left over to actually do any real kernel work will read even half. Except Alan Cox, but he's actually not human, but about a thousand gnomes working in under-ground caves in Swansea. None of the individual gnomes read all the postings either, they just work together really well."
- Linus Torvalds (https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!msg/fa.linux.kernel/iQtWFALi4JA/eSzv64_tOvoJ%5B1-25%5D)
...what were you saying about Linux being 'for serious people only'?
The word "hallucinations" sounds like a terrifying side effect to have, but most likely it's not like you're going on a full on vision trip and interacting with dead family members
...unless the drug in question is somethnig like Ambien...
I set up everything over the phone, since I didn't have any existing service so it would have been pretty difficult to do it online:)
Of course, the pricing I gave for a bundle comes from their website...so if you truly do get better pricing and options over the phone that may mean it's even LESS than only $10 extra to add TV, reinforcing my belief that you get absolutely screwed with a data-only plan.
Interesting...they don't offer a 25/25 plan here (if they did I probably would have gotten that instead). The next plan down from the 50/25 is 15/5, and that's $60/month for data only. But from everything I've heard about FiOS it does seem that their pricing varies wildly by location (probably based on the competition...).
But anyway, I can't get the pricing for data alone as part of the bundle, but internet is $75/month, while the same internet with 200-some TV channels is $85/month.
The 15/5 is cheapest from the cable co -- it's $52/month plus $7/month if you want to rent a modem. The 50/25 is FiOS, it's $75/month which includes a modem/router combo (that is actually pretty decent, gives full ssh access, QoS tools, and a ton of other stuff I've never seen on a consumer router). Pricing gets a decent bit more reasonable if you want things like TV or phone service, but I have no use for either of those so I'm stuck with the absurd data-only pricing.
Slashdot Mirror
My parents still have a 2004 Dell with Windows XP, Service Pack 0, that hasn't had a single issue since they bought it. I've got a four year old Dell laptop that's still running fine on Vista, again no upgrades, and the only problem it's ever had was a motherboard that needed replaced within the first year. Hell I've got a ~1996 Gateway and 1999 Compaq that are still running like the day they were purchased! The MacBook I understand, but who the hell did you buy these XP machines from? What are they, eMachines?
when something goes wrong, I can take it to a human, point out exactly what's wrong, and say, "Fix it" rather than play phone and shipping tag with some contracted-out support company. ... (1 hour of my time, vs. 2-3 months getting the run-around with Toshiba for my wife's previous laptop; there's a brand I'll never touch again).
Well there's your problem -- Toshiba. When the motherboard on my last Dell died a couple years back, I called their phone support and was off the phone in less than 20 minutes, and from the time I called them to the time they mailed me a box, I mailed back my laptop, they replaced the motherboard, and mailed it right back to me...that all took one week. And shit I could have bought TWO of those laptops for the price of a mac and had a spare to use for that week...as it was I had a spare anyway, because I snagged my brother's old Dell and slapped the hard drive into that.
Definitely need a constitutional convection and get rid of the damn thing.
I thought that whole 'Bill of Rights' thing was already long dead and buried?
Yea, I have Linux as my default and prefer Linux as my default because 99.9% of the time that's what I want it to boot into. It's just obnoxious that it takes two or three reboots sometimes to install an update on Windows (Shut it down, on boot it reboots again, then sometimes it will still have things to install and pop up a window saying it's going to reboot AGAIN and there's not a damn thing you can do about it), when I can update my entire system on Linux with at worst one.
Never had a single crash on Linux on this laptop. Hell my old WinXP machine that I used to use for gaming was crashing at least once a week when I left it on Windows, but never saw a single crash that I can recall on Linux.
My first assumption on any kind of frequent crash is almost always hardware failure. And I used to build my own PCs from the cheapest parts I could find ($20 video cards, the half price RAM that gets shipped from Taiwan...) so I have plenty of experience with bad RAM. But when a Linux system won't crash under heavy load, and a Windows system will crash while idle, and they're on the exact same hard drive and the exact same system, hardware failure seems a bit less likely...
Not to mention all the times I hit to boot Win7, walk away for a minute, and come back to see the Linux login prompt. Damn thing can't even get to the login prompt without spontaneously rebooting! And that's not a rare event, that's AT LEAST three quarters of the times I try to boot Windows!
I believe since WinXP (at least ON WinXP) Microsoft by default sets the OS so it doesn't show a BSOD -- it just reboots spontaneously. I don't run Windows anymore, but once I re-enabled the BSOD I used to get them on a damn near daily basis with XP. On the few times I've booted to Win7 on my new laptop (Damn Adobe products...), I'd say I've gotten one mysterious reboot out of around 10 hours spent running the OS.
You don't live in America, clearly. Over here, most programmers are on salary. You work a minimum of 8 hours a day, a maximum of whatever they tell you, and you get paid a certain amount per year to do that. No such thing as 'overtime'. Christ in my company they _brag_ about that time where everyone was pulling 12-16 hour days, and working weekends, for an entire month. No extra pay. (Though they apparently didn't do a damn thing for a month or two prior)
What's interesting about your post is that you assume anyone who opposes Obama MUST, AUTOMATICALLY, WITHOUT QUESTION be a Romney supporter.
There are plenty of us who don't like and won't vote for either of them...because they're two sides of the same goddamn coin.
Let's look at this another way. Government workers are employees of all taxpaying citizens. That's what a Republic is. If the IT department discovers an employee is watching porn at work, he should probably report it to their manager or to HR. That's what Assange is doing. The government has no more right to keep their actions secret from the citizens than you have to keep what you're doing at work secret from your boss.
When is the last time you heard of widespread terrorist attacks by buddhists? Or Sikhs? Hindu? That's right, that never happens. It is always muslims.
Or Christians. Hell there was one of those just a couple weeks ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units#Units_of_mass
The pound avoirdupois, which forms the basis of the U.S. customary system of mass, is defined as exactly 453.59237 grams by agreement between the U.S., the U.K. and other English-speaking countries in 1959. Other units of mass are defined in terms of it.
The avoirdupois pound is legally defined as a measure of mass[15], but the name pound is also applied to measures of force. For instance, in many contexts, the pound avoirdupois is used as a unit of mass, but in some contexts, the term "pound" is used to refer to "pound-force". The slug is another unit of mass derived from pound-force.
RTFS:
"I've long been a lifetime account holder of an old textdrive (now Joyent) cloud hosting account.
The original agreement was with Textdrive. It is now with Joyent. This implies that Textdrive no longer exists.
Except for the fact that _they no longer exist_. That seems a pretty clear way to get out of "as long as we exist"...
The original agreement was with Textdrive. Textdrive is now Joyent -- therefore Textdrive does not exist.
Please get out of Linux, it's for serious people only.
"Note that nobody reads every post in linux-kernel. In fact, nobody who expects to have time left over to actually do any real kernel work will read even half. Except Alan Cox, but he's actually not human, but about a thousand gnomes working in under-ground caves in Swansea. None of the individual gnomes read all the postings either, they just work together really well."
- Linus Torvalds (https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!msg/fa.linux.kernel/iQtWFALi4JA/eSzv64_tOvoJ%5B1-25%5D)
FiOS has RT? Shit, I may have to subscribe to TV then, I currently have a data-only package and I think adding TV is only $5 or $10 extra...
Congrats; first slashdot post to make me actually laugh out loud in about a week. Should have seen an Oracle joke coming, but I did not. Bravo.
Hope my sarcasm detector is just broken. FACT is the name of an organization.
Oblig. XKCD: ...I don't think I want to see that tumblr....
http://xkcd.com/1025/
That will run XP just fine
Of course a ten year old PC will run XP -- XP is just shy of 11 years old currently, so that's probably what it came with!
The word "hallucinations" sounds like a terrifying side effect to have, but most likely it's not like you're going on a full on vision trip and interacting with dead family members
...unless the drug in question is somethnig like Ambien...
cell phone. I don't have phone service through them.
I set up everything over the phone, since I didn't have any existing service so it would have been pretty difficult to do it online :)
Of course, the pricing I gave for a bundle comes from their website...so if you truly do get better pricing and options over the phone that may mean it's even LESS than only $10 extra to add TV, reinforcing my belief that you get absolutely screwed with a data-only plan.
Interesting...they don't offer a 25/25 plan here (if they did I probably would have gotten that instead). The next plan down from the 50/25 is 15/5, and that's $60/month for data only. But from everything I've heard about FiOS it does seem that their pricing varies wildly by location (probably based on the competition...).
But anyway, I can't get the pricing for data alone as part of the bundle, but internet is $75/month, while the same internet with 200-some TV channels is $85/month.
The 15/5 is cheapest from the cable co -- it's $52/month plus $7/month if you want to rent a modem. The 50/25 is FiOS, it's $75/month which includes a modem/router combo (that is actually pretty decent, gives full ssh access, QoS tools, and a ton of other stuff I've never seen on a consumer router). Pricing gets a decent bit more reasonable if you want things like TV or phone service, but I have no use for either of those so I'm stuck with the absurd data-only pricing.