My idea of an ultralight tablet is my Toshiba 3505 with an extra battery and a power brick (probably 6 pounds total). That's still way lighter than any of the conventional notebooks or textbooks it's replaced; now all I need is the tablet and occasionally a book.
I never said I gave up on the problem. The problem was that my wi-fi was not working, or not working reliably (got it to work, just barely, on my brother's laptop). The most effective, most efficient, easiest, and cheapest (yes, cheapest, though access to the microsoft store makes me not exactly a representative sampe) was simple to delete my Linux partition and go back to Windows. Could I have gotten it to work on Linux? Probably. Would it have taken hours and hours, plus continual tweaking every time I want to install a simple program? Probably.
People falsely assume that those who use Windows do so just because they're forced to, or just because they are too dumb for Linux. Quite the contrary; simplicity doesn't mean it's only for simpletons. It means it saves time and effort in the long run.
As for WPA... well, I'll get flamed to hell and back for saying it, but who cares? For the average consumer, WPA (and encrypted IM, and half the other things that geeks rant and rave about) is just paranoid.
I'm not a Windows fanboy. I'm not a Linux hater. I just find that for my needs (general purpose computer such as word processing, browsing, and email, as well as current-gen gaming, IM, media library, etc.) Windows is in my experience faster, more stable, more efficient, and easier to use. And a hell of a lot prettier.
What do you mean, I blew my cover? If you've spent any time with Linux at all you'll know that it's at best at pain and at worst impossible to get Wi-Fi to work, especially with poorly supported hardware (which is most of it), on most freely available distributions.
And plenty of people have use for an exchange server. It's not for everyone, but Outlook+Exchange is a very powerful combo for many corporate and college campus uses. More importantly, lots of people just need to be able to access exchange, and if Linux can't work with the infrastructure, bye bye Linux.
I've tried Microsoft, in USB, PCI, and PCMCIA flavors. I've tried a Linksys or two, I think one was PCI and one was USB, I've tried Hawking (USB), and I've tried my laptop's built in wifi (Toshiba). There was one more PCI that I tried, with no luck, but I don't remember the manufacturer.
I don't have any of them anymore, so I don't remember model numbers. But yes, it did seem more than a little strange.
(For the record, I tried both Linksys and Microsoft routers, too.)
100 = average. Given that "smart" and "dumb" are relative terms, "50% of the people are idiots" is a non-statement. 50% of the people are, by definition, below 100. If everyone got twice as smart and the tests were retaken and scores recalculated, 50% would still be below 100.
And the the way the rest 50% are only better than the rest if you have IQ over 100 it doesn't matter you are a genius.
Jesus christ, did you just write that in an attempt to convince me that other people are dumb?
Well then I'm surprised, because I've had no luck with Wi-Fi in Red Hat 9, Ubuntu, or SuSe (or various LiveCDs) using PCI, PCMCIA, or USB, having tried a total of four different wifi equipment vendors.
Re:At the danger of coming across as an elitist...
on
Fighting FUD with Humor
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Ignoring the fact that IQ is far from a necessarily accurate indicator of intelligence, what's your point? Half the people are smarter, too.
People can talk about the "chaos that reigns the world" and attribute it to stupidity all day. Stick those people in a sociology class for a week and hopefully they'll realize that the world is not a damned simple as they think. To attribute a presidential reelection to something like national stupidity is just plain ignorant. Mostly because matters of politics don't correlate well to intelligence at all (and if someone quotes one of thoe hoax IQ maps of the US I'll punch him in the face. Through my monitor).
Yeah, the average person may or may not be dumber than you. Yeah, there are people even dumber than him. There are also people you'd like like a damn fool next to. I'll say it again: What the hell is your point?
Yeah, it's that easy. To install. Can he get wifi to work? Can he get email from an exhange server? Can he get it to work with most recent games easily and with decent performance?
I doubt it. I'm a computer geek, but I gave up on Linux after spending countless hours with three different distributions trying to get either HPNA or wifi to work reliably (or, hell, at all).
So I just went back to windows. The one where wifi worked on the first boot and installing things involves double-clicking something rather than excruciating package dependencies, config edits, etc., that are never well documented (or at least, not easily and clearly) and vary by distribution.
Sorry, but your latter complaint is mis-directed. News outlets dumb everything down, not just computer stories. You only think they don't dumb airplane stories down because you're (apparently) not a pilot. I am, and I can tell you that very rarely do they give much useful information in a news report -- you have to go to the NTSB for that, and half they time they don't explain well either.
The problem is, of course, audience. News outlets don't report to computer nerds or to pilots, they report to everybody. If plane crash stories had all sorts of mechanical details about the engine or talked in detail about IFR flight plans, angles of attack, ground effect, wingtip vortices, airspace restrictions, etc., the average computer nerd would be bewildered.
It took me a year and a half to get my pilot's license, a few months to get my A+ cert. They leave out just as much in reporting the former.
Well, think of it this way. Minor flaw, major consequences. The flaw itself was probably small, easily correctible, etc. -- "minor." The consequences? Major.
Parallel: I'm walking along the edge of a cliff. I misplace my foot by a few centimeters. Minor error. It causes me to trip and I fly off the cliff. Major consequences.
But if you're a six-foot-tall dinosaur with very strong legs, it doesn't need to have a sharp edge to be able to rip. A deep puncture wound accompanied by a kicking/ripping motion could pretty easily take an awful lot with it on the way out.
I've always been confused that people consider this unique to the nano. My 4g iPod was scratched to hell within about an hour of me owning it, and it's not like I dropped it or anything. It came out of the box with a deep gouge in the thumbwheel, but apple refused to replace it, saying they don't refund for cosmetic damage. The metal on the back scratches like nobody's business. The plastic scratches too, but it's harder to see. I bought a case the next day and have used in in hard plastic cases with inner tubings for its entire life since then (over a year), and it's still all scratched up. The thing gets scratched without even leaving the case.
your US urban sprawl is itself just a symptom of high crime rates, and the high crime rates are in turn a symptom of people deifying wealth instead of God as He is. So if you think you can maintain that nice walkable city and leave God out, I'd say you're right only under two very temporary conditions: (1) you can get away with it for about 30 years until you create your own urban sprawl, or (2) you can get away with it for about 80 years if you're willing to resort to the tactics of Josef Stalin.
Wow, talk about oversimplification/ridiculous cause/effect reasoning here.
To say that urban sprawl is primarily, or even significantly, because of crime rights is a gross oversimplification. People move to the suburbs because it's cheaper to live luxuriously, there's more room for independence, there's more room to raise a family, there's less traffic, it's quieter, they're closer to vacation spots, etc. etc. etc.
Seattle could be absolutely crime-free and I still wouldn't move downtown. I don't like the noise, the density, the industry, not to mention the fact that there's just no place to build a house. It's all zoned off for commerce and industry and business.
As for crime rights as a symptom of people deifying wealth... well, I agree that people deify wealth. I agree that people should deify God. I don't believe it's possible to avoid crime, nor do I believe it's possible to erase idolatry. Finally, I don't believe in a reactionary God.
But most of all, you seem to have missed the part where I was arguing that new urbanism is doomed.
I suppose that prevents criminals from gathering your information and spending it after you make a purchase. Except, oh wait, why would the criminals obey the prohibition on storing CVV2 codes in the first place?
If this is as much a failure and inconvenience as those hellish CVV2 codes on my debit card, I'll explode. What use is a second number if it's on the same card and in teh same forms as the first number? Furthermore, what's the use of a second number if it's UTTERLY INVISIBLE after a week of use? Piece of crap.
*Prevented from ordering harvey danger album 'cus he can't read his CVV2 number and is pissed.*
Right. But you have both a desktop and a laptop -- an iPod would be icing on the cake. For a person who can't afford a proper computer, a video iPod is like icing with no cake to begin with. I own a desktop (homebuilt) and a laptop (an old Tablet PC), as well as a greyscale 4g iPod 20gb. I bought them in that order -- necessity first, necessity second (the laptop is a must now that I'm at a university), luxury last. If I couldn't afford a laptop, then I could by extension barely afford an iPod, and it seems like I'd be better off not buying either. In fact, that's what used to be teh case -- before I had my computer or iPod, I used a cheap Rio player for years, upgrading it every now and then courtesy of Costco's extremely liberal return policy.
Ask it this way: Seeing as how it's essentially teh same design that ALL iPods use, why does the Nano suffer exceptional scratching?
A: Because people stick it in their pants pocket with keys and change.
Sure, the iPod line has always been prone to cosmetic damage, that's by far my biggest gripe with the units. But the reason the nano was particularly suspect to thise was not because of construction, but becuase of form factor. Same reason my tablet PC gets teh screens scratched to hell; not because it's not scratch-resistant (it's far more so than many laptop screens), but because it's designed to be used with your palm resting on it and a pen tapping on it for hours at a time.
If you can't afford a cheap notebook, you shouldn't be spending $300 on an MP3 player. The one is more important and has more utility and more bang-for-the-buck than the other.
An iPod Video is pure luxury. A notebook is, for many people, at least part necessity. It also has a potentially longer life, performs many more functions, etc.
If it comes down to (a) spending $300 on an iPod or (b)spending $999 on a notebook, and you can't afford (b), the best option is (c) IF YOU DON'T HAVE $999, YOU CANT SPARE $300.
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My idea of an ultralight tablet is my Toshiba 3505 with an extra battery and a power brick (probably 6 pounds total). That's still way lighter than any of the conventional notebooks or textbooks it's replaced; now all I need is the tablet and occasionally a book.
I never said I gave up on the problem. The problem was that my wi-fi was not working, or not working reliably (got it to work, just barely, on my brother's laptop). The most effective, most efficient, easiest, and cheapest (yes, cheapest, though access to the microsoft store makes me not exactly a representative sampe) was simple to delete my Linux partition and go back to Windows. Could I have gotten it to work on Linux? Probably. Would it have taken hours and hours, plus continual tweaking every time I want to install a simple program? Probably.
People falsely assume that those who use Windows do so just because they're forced to, or just because they are too dumb for Linux. Quite the contrary; simplicity doesn't mean it's only for simpletons. It means it saves time and effort in the long run.
As for WPA... well, I'll get flamed to hell and back for saying it, but who cares? For the average consumer, WPA (and encrypted IM, and half the other things that geeks rant and rave about) is just paranoid.
I'm not a Windows fanboy. I'm not a Linux hater. I just find that for my needs (general purpose computer such as word processing, browsing, and email, as well as current-gen gaming, IM, media library, etc.) Windows is in my experience faster, more stable, more efficient, and easier to use. And a hell of a lot prettier.
What do you mean, I blew my cover? If you've spent any time with Linux at all you'll know that it's at best at pain and at worst impossible to get Wi-Fi to work, especially with poorly supported hardware (which is most of it), on most freely available distributions.
And plenty of people have use for an exchange server. It's not for everyone, but Outlook+Exchange is a very powerful combo for many corporate and college campus uses. More importantly, lots of people just need to be able to access exchange, and if Linux can't work with the infrastructure, bye bye Linux.
I've tried Microsoft, in USB, PCI, and PCMCIA flavors. I've tried a Linksys or two, I think one was PCI and one was USB, I've tried Hawking (USB), and I've tried my laptop's built in wifi (Toshiba). There was one more PCI that I tried, with no luck, but I don't remember the manufacturer.
I don't have any of them anymore, so I don't remember model numbers. But yes, it did seem more than a little strange.
(For the record, I tried both Linksys and Microsoft routers, too.)
Jesus christ, did you just write that in an attempt to convince me that other people are dumb?
Well then I'm surprised, because I've had no luck with Wi-Fi in Red Hat 9, Ubuntu, or SuSe (or various LiveCDs) using PCI, PCMCIA, or USB, having tried a total of four different wifi equipment vendors.
Ignoring the fact that IQ is far from a necessarily accurate indicator of intelligence, what's your point? Half the people are smarter, too.
People can talk about the "chaos that reigns the world" and attribute it to stupidity all day. Stick those people in a sociology class for a week and hopefully they'll realize that the world is not a damned simple as they think. To attribute a presidential reelection to something like national stupidity is just plain ignorant. Mostly because matters of politics don't correlate well to intelligence at all (and if someone quotes one of thoe hoax IQ maps of the US I'll punch him in the face. Through my monitor).
Yeah, the average person may or may not be dumber than you. Yeah, there are people even dumber than him. There are also people you'd like like a damn fool next to. I'll say it again: What the hell is your point?
Yeah, it's that easy. To install. Can he get wifi to work? Can he get email from an exhange server? Can he get it to work with most recent games easily and with decent performance?
I doubt it. I'm a computer geek, but I gave up on Linux after spending countless hours with three different distributions trying to get either HPNA or wifi to work reliably (or, hell, at all).
So I just went back to windows. The one where wifi worked on the first boot and installing things involves double-clicking something rather than excruciating package dependencies, config edits, etc., that are never well documented (or at least, not easily and clearly) and vary by distribution.
What do you mean it's a horrific thought? It's normalized. Of course half the people are dumber than that. That's the whole point.
Hehe. I was playing an emulated Escape Velocity and I had that problem. It was impossible to tell what was going on.
If only we could make Doom III go by that fast...
Sorry, but your latter complaint is mis-directed. News outlets dumb everything down, not just computer stories. You only think they don't dumb airplane stories down because you're (apparently) not a pilot. I am, and I can tell you that very rarely do they give much useful information in a news report -- you have to go to the NTSB for that, and half they time they don't explain well either.
The problem is, of course, audience. News outlets don't report to computer nerds or to pilots, they report to everybody. If plane crash stories had all sorts of mechanical details about the engine or talked in detail about IFR flight plans, angles of attack, ground effect, wingtip vortices, airspace restrictions, etc., the average computer nerd would be bewildered.
It took me a year and a half to get my pilot's license, a few months to get my A+ cert. They leave out just as much in reporting the former.
Well, think of it this way. Minor flaw, major consequences. The flaw itself was probably small, easily correctible, etc. -- "minor." The consequences? Major.
:p
Parallel: I'm walking along the edge of a cliff. I misplace my foot by a few centimeters. Minor error. It causes me to trip and I fly off the cliff. Major consequences.
Well. I suppose that depends on who I am
But if you're a six-foot-tall dinosaur with very strong legs, it doesn't need to have a sharp edge to be able to rip. A deep puncture wound accompanied by a kicking/ripping motion could pretty easily take an awful lot with it on the way out.
Hell yes! I knew Canada was good for something!
I don't use MSN because my sites are invariably ranked higher in Google. Which means that Google is smarter. Because I am that cool.
I've always been confused that people consider this unique to the nano. My 4g iPod was scratched to hell within about an hour of me owning it, and it's not like I dropped it or anything. It came out of the box with a deep gouge in the thumbwheel, but apple refused to replace it, saying they don't refund for cosmetic damage. The metal on the back scratches like nobody's business. The plastic scratches too, but it's harder to see. I bought a case the next day and have used in in hard plastic cases with inner tubings for its entire life since then (over a year), and it's still all scratched up. The thing gets scratched without even leaving the case.
Grr.
I see. So the follow up question: Why can't they physically raise the card as they do with the number, so it doesn't rub off in two weeks?
To say that urban sprawl is primarily, or even significantly, because of crime rights is a gross oversimplification. People move to the suburbs because it's cheaper to live luxuriously, there's more room for independence, there's more room to raise a family, there's less traffic, it's quieter, they're closer to vacation spots, etc. etc. etc.
Seattle could be absolutely crime-free and I still wouldn't move downtown. I don't like the noise, the density, the industry, not to mention the fact that there's just no place to build a house. It's all zoned off for commerce and industry and business.
As for crime rights as a symptom of people deifying wealth... well, I agree that people deify wealth. I agree that people should deify God. I don't believe it's possible to avoid crime, nor do I believe it's possible to erase idolatry. Finally, I don't believe in a reactionary God.
But most of all, you seem to have missed the part where I was arguing that new urbanism is doomed.
Ahh. Interesting. I didn't know that.
I suppose that prevents criminals from gathering your information and spending it after you make a purchase. Except, oh wait, why would the criminals obey the prohibition on storing CVV2 codes in the first place?
I'm very angry at my CVV2 code.
If this is as much a failure and inconvenience as those hellish CVV2 codes on my debit card, I'll explode. What use is a second number if it's on the same card and in teh same forms as the first number? Furthermore, what's the use of a second number if it's UTTERLY INVISIBLE after a week of use? Piece of crap.
*Prevented from ordering harvey danger album 'cus he can't read his CVV2 number and is pissed.*
Right. But you have both a desktop and a laptop -- an iPod would be icing on the cake. For a person who can't afford a proper computer, a video iPod is like icing with no cake to begin with. I own a desktop (homebuilt) and a laptop (an old Tablet PC), as well as a greyscale 4g iPod 20gb. I bought them in that order -- necessity first, necessity second (the laptop is a must now that I'm at a university), luxury last. If I couldn't afford a laptop, then I could by extension barely afford an iPod, and it seems like I'd be better off not buying either. In fact, that's what used to be teh case -- before I had my computer or iPod, I used a cheap Rio player for years, upgrading it every now and then courtesy of Costco's extremely liberal return policy.
Ask it this way: Seeing as how it's essentially teh same design that ALL iPods use, why does the Nano suffer exceptional scratching?
A: Because people stick it in their pants pocket with keys and change.
Sure, the iPod line has always been prone to cosmetic damage, that's by far my biggest gripe with the units. But the reason the nano was particularly suspect to thise was not because of construction, but becuase of form factor. Same reason my tablet PC gets teh screens scratched to hell; not because it's not scratch-resistant (it's far more so than many laptop screens), but because it's designed to be used with your palm resting on it and a pen tapping on it for hours at a time.
If you can't afford a cheap notebook, you shouldn't be spending $300 on an MP3 player. The one is more important and has more utility and more bang-for-the-buck than the other.
An iPod Video is pure luxury. A notebook is, for many people, at least part necessity. It also has a potentially longer life, performs many more functions, etc.
If it comes down to (a) spending $300 on an iPod or (b)spending $999 on a notebook, and you can't afford (b), the best option is (c) IF YOU DON'T HAVE $999, YOU CANT SPARE $300.
On the one hand, that could just be a general iPod video site, with pictures of video on the iPod, reviews, etc.
On the other hand, and this seems more likely, it could be entire not-safe-for-work/school.
As the network nazis are always looking over my shoulder, I'm afraid of your link.
No, it does LAME.
ba dum ksssshhhhh