I wonder how they calculated that 32.47 year figure? Are they assuming that every bit will be written to once before any other bit is written to again? So if you were to write out to all bits sequentially, over and over again, it would take 32.47 years to hit all of the bits 1 million times?
If so that's not a very useful way to calculate lifespan of the device. A much more typical usage pattern will have certain bits written very frequently and certain bits written never at all.
Their rating of 1 million write/erase cycles is the really interesting part. If I had a database server that wrote to the same area on disk (maybe a heavily-used row of a table or something), I wouldn't be surprised if the same spot on disk was written to well over 10,000 times per day. At this rate, those bits on the drive would die after 100 days.
I wonder if their devices automatically work around "dead" bits, remapping that section to a new area of the drive? In this case, every time a bit died it would transparently be replaced by a working bit. But then your drive would continuously be shrinking as your bits died...
The editors of Slashdot seem to love posting articles whose sole purpose is to evoke flame wars between Intel fans and AMD fans.
For what it's worth, I read the article and the processors seemed pretty well matched except for some "synthetic" benchmarks. I don't know much about the synthetic benchmarks that they used, but I have found that synthetic benchmarks are almost always biased in Intel's favor. Do synthetic benchmark writers optimize for Intel accidentally or is there some kind of conspiracy going on here? You be the judge.
Finally, to try to balance out the article submitter's inflammatory comments about the Athlon being "trounced in FPU intensive benchmarks", here is a nice paragraph from the article summary:
"That's not to say that the Xeon CPU necessarily deserves excessive praise just yet. At time of publication, our Xeon processor retails for $850 and the Athlon 3500+ retails for about $500 less. Also, keep in mind that the AMD processor is clocked 1400MHz slower than the 3.6GHz Xeon. With only a few exceptions, the 3.6GHz Xeon outperformed our Athlon 64 3500+, whether or not the cost and thermal issues between these two processors are justifiable."
Obviously they are not comparing processors which have price parity, so one could spin this either as "look at how slow the Athlon is", or "look at how much money you have to spend to get an Intel chip that is faster than an Athlon", depending upon your bias.
I work for TiVo and I implemented most of the "parental controls" functionality present in TiVo software. I can attest to the fact that V-Chip ratings are pretty hit-and-miss: some networks use them consistently, some don't. It's much worse with digital over-the-air broadcasts: even though the FCC has more control over over-the-air broadcasts, all the stations that I have seen very, very rarely broadcast ratings in their PSIP data.
I am all for the V-Chip system because it gives parents the ability to restrict their kids viewing without actually controlling the content itself (V-Chip ratings simply augment the content and make it easier to determine ahead of time if the content is acceptable for a child to watch).
But, I think that V-Chip ratings should be *much* more detailed, precise, and most importantly, UNIVERSALLY ENFORCED. And I think that the FCC should have the responsibility and power to force all broadcasters to very thoroughly and accurately rate their broadcasts.
In a democracy, the government IS the public. It is made up of public citizens, selected publicly, with the sole purpose of putting into effect the common will of the public.
The FCC is a branch of the government.
Therefore, the FCC *IS* the public, and SHOULD be allowed to do what I propose.
Parents ARE able to decide for themselves what is acceptable, but they need to KNOW what it is they are deciding about before they can make the decision. A thorough and complete ratings (and description!) system for all programming would simply allow parents to KNOW what it is they are deciding about and make MORE INFORMED decisions.
Parents should also be allowed to decide that anything broadcast over the airwaves is perfectly acceptable for their kids to watch, in which case they would simply IGNORE the ratings that I have described.
[quote] If soccer mom's are afraid that their kid might see something bad on TV, they can: A) don't let the kid watch TV or B) let the kid watch and explain it was wrong. having the gov't rate what is right and wrong is just flat-out wrong. what's next? the FCC says a Christian radio show isn't indecent, but a Jewish one is? [/quote]
Apparently, you agree with me, even though you think you don't.
I said that the government should enforce very detailed, thorough, and complete ratings for programming. Then parents will have the ability to *control what kids watch without even having to be in front of the TV*. They can just select a level (or hopefully a more complex and detailed set of criteria for deciding what the kids can watch) and for those times when they are not around (which of course should be few and far between - responsible parenting and all that), their decision can be carried out by the dumb slave that is the rating system electronics in the TV.
Currently we have something kind of like this; the FCC mandated V-Chip ratings but they are very incomplete, very granular, not detailed, and not really enforced. We just need a much more thorough ratings system and a more sophisticated ratings delivery mechanism (more detailed digital data encoded in the broadcast), "smarter" TV circuitry, and someone willing to force this rating system on all broadcasters.
Then we'll have the best of all worlds: parents who don't give a shit can let their kids watch what they want, and those that care have the most complete toolset possible for restricting their children's viewing habits, for those times when (GOD FORBID!!!) they should not be around to explicitly control the remote.
Please read my comments again. I said that I think that broadcasters should be required to accurately rate and describe the content of their programs. Then it should be up to parents to use the tools available to them to limit what their children watch.
The airwaves are a public resource. The public has every right to place restrictions on how it is used for the greater good of the owners of that resource (which is, of course, the public). I see no problem with the FCC enforcing very thorough and complete ratings on all broadcast programming. And it's not censorship either, in fact I said that the government should NOT censor what is on the airwaves at all, it should just require broadcasters to be up front about what is being aired so that parents can decide ahead of time what is appropriate for their children and what isn't.
... for me and for my kids. Better yet, don't censor the airwaves at all, just require a very thorough, detailed, and precise rating system, and enforce it. Then parents can decide what is suitable for themselves to view as well as their children, and nobody needs to step on anyone else's right to broadcast what they want or watch what they want.
Also, I think that any program whose audience is intended to be children, should not be allowed to have commercials. This would protect kids from commercial interests and would have the side benefit of reducing the amount of insipid commercial programming that wastes kids' time and rots their brains and bodies (because producing such programming would no longer be profitable, and all that kids would be left with would be educational programming on PBS).
Of course, there's nothing more important than responsible parenting, and that should be the first line of defense for children. But just because we want parents to be responsible doesn't mean that we shouldn't give them all the tools possible to be such, and provide as much of a safety net as possible for those kids whose parents are not responsible.
You do not have to buy the service. There are TiVo models which come with a minimal version of the TiVo feature set which allows you to treat it basically like a digital VCR. It's nowhere near as featureful and nice as a "real" TiVo but it will allow you to record shows by picking them out of a three-day-guide or setting up repeating timeslot recordings, manually.
Anyone who doesn't buy the TiVo service has completely missed the point, however, and through stubbornness and miserlyness is missing out on the whole point of the best DVR there is.
Because for programs which only have a single thread of execution (I would say the majority of programs fall into this category), your program is going to run on only one core at a time and at the speed of a 486 (or Pentium, depending upon which one you used).
You could theoretically run N instances of single-threaded programs (where N is the number of processors in your core) and all would run without speed penalty. Or you could run N threads from a single multi-threaded program, and you could get close to a speedup factor of N.
In other words, truly multithreaded programs with lots of concurrency might get somewhat close to N times the performance of a 486, but most programs would perform about as well as they would on a 486. It's just that you could run more of them at the same time without speed penalty.
I would expect that a processor with 32 Intel 486 cores would feel most of the time like a fast 486, until you ran that one perfectly parallelizable program, at which point it would finally feel very fast.
Also, having 30 or so of your 486 cores sitting idle most of the time would result in alot of wasted electricity.
Without generalization, there would be no way to make any statements whatsoever about groups of people. Generalization is required, and most intelligent people will recognize that when someone speaks about "Windows users" or some other large group, they are implicitly acknowledging the inherent inaccuracies of such generalizations. But the commonalities among large groups of people - such as "Windows users" - are much more interesting thah the myriad of minute differences. So we talk about them using generalizations because otherwise, there would be no conversation to be had.
I have been using Linux for 10 years now and in my vast experience it is extremely, extremely rare that any installation of Linux will mess up your system in a way that is unfriendly to other operating systems already installed. The developers of the Linux kernel and the various distributions built on top of it have bent over backwards time and time again to work around other vendors' bugs so that Linux can peacefully co-exist with other operating systems. Microsoft, to nobody's surprise, has NEVER done ANYTHING to co-exist reasonably with Linux or any other operating system aside from multiple variants of their own.
Bugs happen dude. Your claim that the multitude of extremely brilliant programmers who put together the Linux kernel and Linux distributions can't "get it right" is just ridiculous.
Your entire post is nothing more than a whine and a rant and obviously you haven't even read enough about this particular bug to see that the reason that it is occurring have been determined (some changes to the kernel's handling of BIOS disk sizes, these changes not being reflected in partitioning utilities, and bad interaction thereof with Windows BROKEN boot loaders), and a FIX IS KNOWN AND AVAILABLE.
It just seems so INCREDIBLY ARROGANT for you to tell the operating systems developers out there that this stuff is clearly so easy and they must not be trying hard enough or something because if they were more competent or worked harder they could "get it right".
If it is that easy, then why don't YOU write the disk geometry detection code for Linux and why don't YOU go to Redmond and sleep on the steps of Microsoft Headquarters until you can get them to let you modify their code to fix their bugs?
I have a generic 5+ year old Kapok notebook that is still going strong. It turned out to be a much, much, MUCH better value than any IBM, Toshiba, or Dell.
I don't think that laptop manufacturers differ so much that you should evaluate them based on brand. Evaluate them based on model and features, not brand.
How is it that your English is so good? I am constantly amazed at how well some people who presumably have never lived in an English-speaking country can speak English. It's just amazing. Very impressive.
I have been a big AMD fan for a long time. I still prefer AMD and will build my next system with an Athlon 64.
But my friend recently upgraded his system to an Athlon XP 3000+ and I have to agree with you. It pumps out the heat. He has trouble keeping it under 65 degrees C. His heatsink is Athlon 3000+ approved. He originally was using the same heatsink as he had on his XP 1800+, and going to a 3000+ rated heat sink only brought the temperature down by 2 or 3 degrees C.
At work I have a 3 Ghz P4. It runs very cool. The heatsink never gets more than mildly warm to the touch. My friend's Athlon 3000+ system pumps out very warm air. Even when his system is idling, it seems to produce more heat than my system at work does under full load.
I am still a big fan of AMD, and will continue to use their processors in the future. And I have read conflicting reports on power usage - some people say that the P4 uses more power, some say that the Athlon uses more. All I know is that in my (limited) experience, the Athlons run much much hotter.
That being said, my friend is *very* happy with the performance he gets out of his 3000+. He's keeping it despite the heat issue because it just runs soooo fast...
When I was in college a friend from the rugby team killed himself. I noticed days later that his student computer account was still open and emails had been received after his death. It gave a strange feeling to "finger" his account (which was how we found out about people in the old pre-web days) and have it return status information about him almost as if he was alive. I guess I can't really describe how it felt, almost like in some way some part of his life was still going on even though he was no longer around. I wrote to the system administrators and asked them to close his account down, which they did.
Not that it's relevent to the question at hand, but I never could understand what would cause someone to take their own life. Of course, logically I understand what causes it - complete and utter despair - but emotionally, I guess that I have never (thankfully) felt down enough to empathize with someone who commits suicide. It seems like such a waste. The summer before this he and I had decided to try to get into good shape for the upcoming rugby season, and we pushed each other at the gym and during runs and sprints. After he killed himself, I just had to wonder, what is the point of working so hard to get into good shape and then just ending your life?
Personal anectodes aside, I don't really see much point to this Ask Slashdot question (which is usually the case as Ask Slashdot is the lamest part of Slashdot by far). Your digital files will be treated the same way as your paper files after you die, and people have been dealing with the question of how to ensure that their personal effects are handled in the way that they would want to for thousands of years now. My advice to anyone reading this would I guess be to keep encrypted anything that you don't want anyone to see after you are gone, and for anything else, don't worry about it.
I think alot of people misunderstood my post. Probably my fault as I wasn't entirely clear.
I don't think it's a shame that this has happened. I just think it's interesting. It's a throwback to a different era, when even little nowhere towns in the middle of Pennsylvania could fabricate chips, and tiny tech startups were happening in Florida and Oklahoma and everywhere. I really have no position whatsoever on whether or not it's better this way or that way, I just thought it was interesting.
Check others' comments as well. The grandparent poster (that I originally responded to) is changing the linked-to photos to be either goatse.cx or the correct photos as needed to get moderator points. If you go there at the wrong time you will definitely get a nasty photo. People who do this are socially retarded.
I found an old Fry's Electronics San Jose Mercury News ad section in a box of old papers at my father-in-law's house once a couple of moths ago. As a joke I replaced the ad in that day's newspaper with it. It was funny seeing his reaction later that evening when he browsed to the Fry's section to check out the day's deals as he normally does. It took a little while before he realized what was going on. Fry's ads from 1989 look almost identical to those of today, but the 386's listed for $2500 and dot matrix printers for $500 eventually tipped him off to the joke.
One thing I notice is that 20+ years ago alot more high tech development seemed to have been happening all over the USA, instead of being highly concentrated in just a few places as seems to be the case now. Printers from Florida? Word Processors from Oklahoma? I remember reading the the original MOS chips were manufactured in PA in the 1970s! If I bought a printer today and the box said that it was manufactured anywhere other than Taiwan or China, let alone Florida or Oklahoma, I'd be shocked!
There is now a poll up on the TiVo community forum addressing your very point. So far: 4 "love it", 2 "really like it", no negative votes. This is of course a *very* small sample. But as votes come in we'll have a better idea of the general sentiment... see:
Toshiba DVD players with built-in TiVo and Pioneer DVD recorders with built-in TiVo come with TiVo Basic which provides a limited programming guide (3 days I believe) and the ability to manually record programs (either scheduling them from the program guide or manually entering a time and channel to record)... and there is no service charge.
You can get what you want. The Toshiba DVD player with built-in TiVo and the Pioneer DVD recorder with built-in TiVo both come with TiVo Basic, which has no recurring service costs. TiVo Basic includes a reduced programming schedule (3 days I believe?) and only lets you set up recordings manually - either via timer or be selecting them from the program guide. This is *exactly* what you say that you want.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder how they calculated that 32.47 year figure? Are they assuming that every bit will be written to once before any other bit is written to again? So if you were to write out to all bits sequentially, over and over again, it would take 32.47 years to hit all of the bits 1 million times?
...
If so that's not a very useful way to calculate lifespan of the device. A much more typical usage pattern will have certain bits written very frequently and certain bits written never at all.
Their rating of 1 million write/erase cycles is the really interesting part. If I had a database server that wrote to the same area on disk (maybe a heavily-used row of a table or something), I wouldn't be surprised if the same spot on disk was written to well over 10,000 times per day. At this rate, those bits on the drive would die after 100 days.
I wonder if their devices automatically work around "dead" bits, remapping that section to a new area of the drive? In this case, every time a bit died it would transparently be replaced by a working bit. But then your drive would continuously be shrinking as your bits died
The editors of Slashdot seem to love posting articles whose sole purpose is to evoke flame wars between Intel fans and AMD fans.
For what it's worth, I read the article and the processors seemed pretty well matched except for some "synthetic" benchmarks. I don't know much about the synthetic benchmarks that they used, but I have found that synthetic benchmarks are almost always biased in Intel's favor. Do synthetic benchmark writers optimize for Intel accidentally or is there some kind of conspiracy going on here? You be the judge.
Finally, to try to balance out the article submitter's inflammatory comments about the Athlon being "trounced in FPU intensive benchmarks", here is a nice paragraph from the article summary:
"That's not to say that the Xeon CPU necessarily deserves excessive praise just yet. At time of publication, our Xeon processor retails for $850 and the Athlon 3500+ retails for about $500 less. Also, keep in mind that the AMD processor is clocked 1400MHz slower than the 3.6GHz Xeon. With only a few exceptions, the 3.6GHz Xeon outperformed our Athlon 64 3500+, whether or not the cost and thermal issues between these two processors are justifiable."
Obviously they are not comparing processors which have price parity, so one could spin this either as "look at how slow the Athlon is", or "look at how much money you have to spend to get an Intel chip that is faster than an Athlon", depending upon your bias.
Well, I thought that we were having an interesting discussion but since you've brought it down to name-calling, there's no longer any point.
Very true, but the V-Chip system is pretty weak.
I work for TiVo and I implemented most of the "parental controls" functionality present in TiVo software. I can attest to the fact that V-Chip ratings are pretty hit-and-miss: some networks use them consistently, some don't. It's much worse with digital over-the-air broadcasts: even though the FCC has more control over over-the-air broadcasts, all the stations that I have seen very, very rarely broadcast ratings in their PSIP data.
I am all for the V-Chip system because it gives parents the ability to restrict their kids viewing without actually controlling the content itself (V-Chip ratings simply augment the content and make it easier to determine ahead of time if the content is acceptable for a child to watch).
But, I think that V-Chip ratings should be *much* more detailed, precise, and most importantly, UNIVERSALLY ENFORCED. And I think that the FCC should have the responsibility and power to force all broadcasters to very thoroughly and accurately rate their broadcasts.
In a democracy, the government IS the public. It is made up of public citizens, selected publicly, with the sole purpose of putting into effect the common will of the public.
The FCC is a branch of the government.
Therefore, the FCC *IS* the public, and SHOULD be allowed to do what I propose.
Parents ARE able to decide for themselves what is acceptable, but they need to KNOW what it is they are deciding about before they can make the decision. A thorough and complete ratings (and description!) system for all programming would simply allow parents to KNOW what it is they are deciding about and make MORE INFORMED decisions.
Parents should also be allowed to decide that anything broadcast over the airwaves is perfectly acceptable for their kids to watch, in which case they would simply IGNORE the ratings that I have described.
[quote]
If soccer mom's are afraid that their kid might see something bad on TV, they can: A) don't let the kid watch TV or B) let the kid watch and explain it was wrong. having the gov't rate what is right and wrong is just flat-out wrong. what's next? the FCC says a Christian radio show isn't indecent, but a Jewish one is?
[/quote]
Apparently, you agree with me, even though you think you don't.
I said that the government should enforce very detailed, thorough, and complete ratings for programming. Then parents will have the ability to *control what kids watch without even having to be in front of the TV*. They can just select a level (or hopefully a more complex and detailed set of criteria for deciding what the kids can watch) and for those times when they are not around (which of course should be few and far between - responsible parenting and all that), their decision can be carried out by the dumb slave that is the rating system electronics in the TV.
Currently we have something kind of like this; the FCC mandated V-Chip ratings but they are very incomplete, very granular, not detailed, and not really enforced. We just need a much more thorough ratings system and a more sophisticated ratings delivery mechanism (more detailed digital data encoded in the broadcast), "smarter" TV circuitry, and someone willing to force this rating system on all broadcasters.
Then we'll have the best of all worlds: parents who don't give a shit can let their kids watch what they want, and those that care have the most complete toolset possible for restricting their children's viewing habits, for those times when (GOD FORBID!!!) they should not be around to explicitly control the remote.
Please read my comments again. I said that I think that broadcasters should be required to accurately rate and describe the content of their programs. Then it should be up to parents to use the tools available to them to limit what their children watch.
The airwaves are a public resource. The public has every right to place restrictions on how it is used for the greater good of the owners of that resource (which is, of course, the public). I see no problem with the FCC enforcing very thorough and complete ratings on all broadcast programming. And it's not censorship either, in fact I said that the government should NOT censor what is on the airwaves at all, it should just require broadcasters to be up front about what is being aired so that parents can decide ahead of time what is appropriate for their children and what isn't.
... for me and for my kids. Better yet, don't censor the airwaves at all, just require a very thorough, detailed, and precise rating system, and enforce it. Then parents can decide what is suitable for themselves to view as well as their children, and nobody needs to step on anyone else's right to broadcast what they want or watch what they want.
Also, I think that any program whose audience is intended to be children, should not be allowed to have commercials. This would protect kids from commercial interests and would have the side benefit of reducing the amount of insipid commercial programming that wastes kids' time and rots their brains and bodies (because producing such programming would no longer be profitable, and all that kids would be left with would be educational programming on PBS).
Of course, there's nothing more important than responsible parenting, and that should be the first line of defense for children. But just because we want parents to be responsible doesn't mean that we shouldn't give them all the tools possible to be such, and provide as much of a safety net as possible for those kids whose parents are not responsible.
You do not have to buy the service. There are TiVo models which come with a minimal version of the TiVo feature set which allows you to treat it basically like a digital VCR. It's nowhere near as featureful and nice as a "real" TiVo but it will allow you to record shows by picking them out of a three-day-guide or setting up repeating timeslot recordings, manually.
Anyone who doesn't buy the TiVo service has completely missed the point, however, and through stubbornness and miserlyness is missing out on the whole point of the best DVR there is.
BTW, I work for TiVo. Just so you know.
Because for programs which only have a single thread of execution (I would say the majority of programs fall into this category), your program is going to run on only one core at a time and at the speed of a 486 (or Pentium, depending upon which one you used).
You could theoretically run N instances of single-threaded programs (where N is the number of processors in your core) and all would run without speed penalty. Or you could run N threads from a single multi-threaded program, and you could get close to a speedup factor of N.
In other words, truly multithreaded programs with lots of concurrency might get somewhat close to N times the performance of a 486, but most programs would perform about as well as they would on a 486. It's just that you could run more of them at the same time without speed penalty.
I would expect that a processor with 32 Intel 486 cores would feel most of the time like a fast 486, until you ran that one perfectly parallelizable program, at which point it would finally feel very fast.
Also, having 30 or so of your 486 cores sitting idle most of the time would result in alot of wasted electricity.
Without generalization, there would be no way to make any statements whatsoever about groups of people. Generalization is required, and most intelligent people will recognize that when someone speaks about "Windows users" or some other large group, they are implicitly acknowledging the inherent inaccuracies of such generalizations. But the commonalities among large groups of people - such as "Windows users" - are much more interesting thah the myriad of minute differences. So we talk about them using generalizations because otherwise, there would be no conversation to be had.
That was a really pathetic diatribe.
I have been using Linux for 10 years now and in my vast experience it is extremely, extremely rare that any installation of Linux will mess up your system in a way that is unfriendly to other operating systems already installed. The developers of the Linux kernel and the various distributions built on top of it have bent over backwards time and time again to work around other vendors' bugs so that Linux can peacefully co-exist with other operating systems. Microsoft, to nobody's surprise, has NEVER done ANYTHING to co-exist reasonably with Linux or any other operating system aside from multiple variants of their own.
Bugs happen dude. Your claim that the multitude of extremely brilliant programmers who put together the Linux kernel and Linux distributions can't "get it right" is just ridiculous.
Your entire post is nothing more than a whine and a rant and obviously you haven't even read enough about this particular bug to see that the reason that it is occurring have been determined (some changes to the kernel's handling of BIOS disk sizes, these changes not being reflected in partitioning utilities, and bad interaction thereof with Windows BROKEN boot loaders), and a FIX IS KNOWN AND AVAILABLE.
It just seems so INCREDIBLY ARROGANT for you to tell the operating systems developers out there that this stuff is clearly so easy and they must not be trying hard enough or something because if they were more competent or worked harder they could "get it right".
If it is that easy, then why don't YOU write the disk geometry detection code for Linux and why don't YOU go to Redmond and sleep on the steps of Microsoft Headquarters until you can get them to let you modify their code to fix their bugs?
This advice is baseless.
I have a generic 5+ year old Kapok notebook that is still going strong. It turned out to be a much, much, MUCH better value than any IBM, Toshiba, or Dell.
I don't think that laptop manufacturers differ so much that you should evaluate them based on brand. Evaluate them based on model and features, not brand.
Oh, except for Sony. STAY AWAY FROM SONY!
How is it that your English is so good? I am constantly amazed at how well some people who presumably have never lived in an English-speaking country can speak English. It's just amazing. Very impressive.
I have been a big AMD fan for a long time. I still prefer AMD and will build my next system with an Athlon 64.
...
But my friend recently upgraded his system to an Athlon XP 3000+ and I have to agree with you. It pumps out the heat. He has trouble keeping it under 65 degrees C. His heatsink is Athlon 3000+ approved. He originally was using the same heatsink as he had on his XP 1800+, and going to a 3000+ rated heat sink only brought the temperature down by 2 or 3 degrees C.
At work I have a 3 Ghz P4. It runs very cool. The heatsink never gets more than mildly warm to the touch. My friend's Athlon 3000+ system pumps out very warm air. Even when his system is idling, it seems to produce more heat than my system at work does under full load.
I am still a big fan of AMD, and will continue to use their processors in the future. And I have read conflicting reports on power usage - some people say that the P4 uses more power, some say that the Athlon uses more. All I know is that in my (limited) experience, the Athlons run much much hotter.
That being said, my friend is *very* happy with the performance he gets out of his 3000+. He's keeping it despite the heat issue because it just runs soooo fast
When I was in college a friend from the rugby team killed himself. I noticed days later that his student computer account was still open and emails had been received after his death. It gave a strange feeling to "finger" his account (which was how we found out about people in the old pre-web days) and have it return status information about him almost as if he was alive. I guess I can't really describe how it felt, almost like in some way some part of his life was still going on even though he was no longer around. I wrote to the system administrators and asked them to close his account down, which they did.
Not that it's relevent to the question at hand, but I never could understand what would cause someone to take their own life. Of course, logically I understand what causes it - complete and utter despair - but emotionally, I guess that I have never (thankfully) felt down enough to empathize with someone who commits suicide. It seems like such a waste. The summer before this he and I had decided to try to get into good shape for the upcoming rugby season, and we pushed each other at the gym and during runs and sprints. After he killed himself, I just had to wonder, what is the point of working so hard to get into good shape and then just ending your life?
Personal anectodes aside, I don't really see much point to this Ask Slashdot question (which is usually the case as Ask Slashdot is the lamest part of Slashdot by far). Your digital files will be treated the same way as your paper files after you die, and people have been dealing with the question of how to ensure that their personal effects are handled in the way that they would want to for thousands of years now. My advice to anyone reading this would I guess be to keep encrypted anything that you don't want anyone to see after you are gone, and for anything else, don't worry about it.
I think alot of people misunderstood my post. Probably my fault as I wasn't entirely clear.
I don't think it's a shame that this has happened. I just think it's interesting. It's a throwback to a different era, when even little nowhere towns in the middle of Pennsylvania could fabricate chips, and tiny tech startups were happening in Florida and Oklahoma and everywhere. I really have no position whatsoever on whether or not it's better this way or that way, I just thought it was interesting.
Check others' comments as well. The grandparent poster (that I originally responded to) is changing the linked-to photos to be either goatse.cx or the correct photos as needed to get moderator points. If you go there at the wrong time you will definitely get a nasty photo. People who do this are socially retarded.
I found an old Fry's Electronics San Jose Mercury News ad section in a box of old papers at my father-in-law's house once a couple of moths ago. As a joke I replaced the ad in that day's newspaper with it. It was funny seeing his reaction later that evening when he browsed to the Fry's section to check out the day's deals as he normally does. It took a little while before he realized what was going on. Fry's ads from 1989 look almost identical to those of today, but the 386's listed for $2500 and dot matrix printers for $500 eventually tipped him off to the joke.
It's a stupid story, but I thought it was funny.
If you click on any of the images from the site that he has mirrored, you get the goatse.cx photo. Parent poster is a retarded child.
One thing I notice is that 20+ years ago alot more high tech development seemed to have been happening all over the USA, instead of being highly concentrated in just a few places as seems to be the case now. Printers from Florida? Word Processors from Oklahoma? I remember reading the the original MOS chips were manufactured in PA in the 1970s! If I bought a printer today and the box said that it was manufactured anywhere other than Taiwan or China, let alone Florida or Oklahoma, I'd be shocked!
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/poll.php?s=&a ction=showresults&pollid=2255
href="http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/poll.ph p?s=&action=showresults&pollid=2255
Toshiba DVD players with built-in TiVo and Pioneer DVD recorders with built-in TiVo come with TiVo Basic which provides a limited programming guide (3 days I believe) and the ability to manually record programs (either scheduling them from the program guide or manually entering a time and channel to record) ... and there is no service charge.
You can get what you want. The Toshiba DVD player with built-in TiVo and the Pioneer DVD recorder with built-in TiVo both come with TiVo Basic, which has no recurring service costs. TiVo Basic includes a reduced programming schedule (3 days I believe?) and only lets you set up recordings manually - either via timer or be selecting them from the program guide. This is *exactly* what you say that you want.