"I really am curious where you found a 2006 machine with NO sata port..."
I didn't "find" it, it was brought to me to fix. Presumably because nobody else was willing to look at it. (Actually, as it was the end of last year, technically it was a 2005 machine.,.)
Even in 2006 it cost extra to buy a motherboard with dual interfaces. The guy who built this machine used the cheapest parts available at the time.
The last time I had this problem it was actually cheaper to get a secondhand motherboard with a SATA interface and swap that out before fitting a SATA drive. (The motherboard only cost me £10, and it took the same processor and memory...)
They all use the same "just in time" warehouses, so when one is out of stock they all are. Last time I needed a PATA IDE drive everybody had the same "Delivery in 3-5 weeks" estimate.
Indeed. When you have a 4-year old machine with a dead IDE hard drive and you try to get a replacement you end up buying another potentially faulty used drive on eBay because the only drives anybody has in stock new are SATA. It takes a lot of time and money for little confidence in the final repair.
The computer industry has a vested interest in continually-changing "standards" which make it less attractive to repair machines and more attractive to buy a replacement.
I'm currently running dual screens under OpenSUSE 11.2. Multiple screens is easy, getting them to run in portrait mode (on nVidia) is somewhat trickier. (It was easy under OpenSUSE 10.x, but the driver for the new Kernel in 11.x broke it...) But once it's working you can run Compiz, which puts window management streets ahead of any Micro$oft products. It's worth the effort.
has any cell phone company even thought to license and/or make a functional cell phone of the replica of the Star Trek communicator of the original series?
"It's the next-best thing to requiring a license to use the 'net. "
Instead, you'll need a license to run a peer-to-peer protocol.* Any traffic from an "unlicensed application" will be assumed to be malware and thus blocked. That way, only "authorised" applications from vendors who have paid for a license will work. How many of those will be things like "iTunes" and how many things like "BitTorrent"...?
(*Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get us...)
I made an eBay sale recently. The charges, when I placed the auction, amounted to 50p, but by the time Paypal took them from my bank account they had quadrupled to £2. On an item that only sold for £15 this amounts to a 10% surcharge. But who is getting the extra £1.50?
eBay say that the discrepancy is down to Paypal, Paypal say they're just passing on eBay's charges. Yet, as far as I can gather, they are the same company?!?
I get the feeling they are "bouncing" small amounts like this back and forth between the two divisions in the hope that nobody will notice, or at least that we can't be bothered chasing it up.
I think the idea of this is to render the drives unreadable before you trust a crate of them to the guy with a van who says he's taking them directly to the recycling centre.
Yes, but that has no bearing on this system! If they mounted huge foam boxing gloves in each bay and encouraged drivers to stop by ramming them, perhaps that would allow the harvesting of otherwise-wasted energy, but as I keep trying to point out the energy being harvested here wouldn't be expended in the first place if the system wasn't there, and is paid for in its entirety by the customer while emitting its share of carbon despite all the "spin" saying it's free and ecologically neutral.
That only holds true if the car has to brake anyway. All the diagrams show these on the level...
And if they put in a downramp so the cars would be being slowed at the bottom you'd still waste the same amount of fuel driving the car back up the ramp to leave. Actually more, as the cars would now be fully laden with shopping...
In that case, the customers aren't being asked to pay for the sunshine. This is, in essence, the same as putting parking meters at every parking space and then using the income from that to buy electricity - they paid a one-off fee for the infrastructure in the knowledge that the customers would then pay them a steady income stream thereafter. Only the scale is different.
Slashdot Mirror
...will be browsers like Firefox and Opera that have been set to report themselves as being IE6 just so corporate websites will let them on.
It's amusing that you think of it as a "snide remark", when I intended it as merely factual.
Are people really that stupid?
Yes. Remember that a large percentage of English-language web users are American.
"I really am curious where you found a 2006 machine with NO sata port..."
I didn't "find" it, it was brought to me to fix. Presumably because nobody else was willing to look at it. (Actually, as it was the end of last year, technically it was a 2005 machine.,.)
Even in 2006 it cost extra to buy a motherboard with dual interfaces. The guy who built this machine used the cheapest parts available at the time.
The last time I had this problem it was actually cheaper to get a secondhand motherboard with a SATA interface and swap that out before fitting a SATA drive. (The motherboard only cost me £10, and it took the same processor and memory...)
They all use the same "just in time" warehouses, so when one is out of stock they all are. Last time I needed a PATA IDE drive everybody had the same "Delivery in 3-5 weeks" estimate.
Indeed. When you have a 4-year old machine with a dead IDE hard drive and you try to get a replacement you end up buying another potentially faulty used drive on eBay because the only drives anybody has in stock new are SATA. It takes a lot of time and money for little confidence in the final repair.
The computer industry has a vested interest in continually-changing "standards" which make it less attractive to repair machines and more attractive to buy a replacement.
Where's Professor Quatermass when we need him???
...I vote for Joss Whedon.
No problem. :-)
Because I prefer Gnome to KDE.
I'm currently running dual screens under OpenSUSE 11.2. Multiple screens is easy, getting them to run in portrait mode (on nVidia) is somewhat trickier. (It was easy under OpenSUSE 10.x, but the driver for the new Kernel in 11.x broke it...) But once it's working you can run Compiz, which puts window management streets ahead of any Micro$oft products. It's worth the effort.
"Make" are way ahead of you...
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/11/star_trek_bluetooth_communicator.html
It may have been cheaper to license an existing Micro$oft design than it would have been to get their own drivers certified for Vista/Windoze 7.
"It's the next-best thing to requiring a license to use the 'net. "
Instead, you'll need a license to run a peer-to-peer protocol.* Any traffic from an "unlicensed application" will be assumed to be malware and thus blocked. That way, only "authorised" applications from vendors who have paid for a license will work. How many of those will be things like "iTunes" and how many things like "BitTorrent"...?
(*Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get us...)
I made an eBay sale recently. The charges, when I placed the auction, amounted to 50p, but by the time Paypal took them from my bank account they had quadrupled to £2. On an item that only sold for £15 this amounts to a 10% surcharge. But who is getting the extra £1.50?
eBay say that the discrepancy is down to Paypal, Paypal say they're just passing on eBay's charges. Yet, as far as I can gather, they are the same company?!?
I get the feeling they are "bouncing" small amounts like this back and forth between the two divisions in the hope that nobody will notice, or at least that we can't be bothered chasing it up.
I wish more sites accepted Google Checkout.
Crushing the drive does not prevent you recycling it afterwards.
I think the idea of this is to render the drives unreadable before you trust a crate of them to the guy with a van who says he's taking them directly to the recycling centre.
Are you saying that this is a BIOS-level process that only introduces a Windows vulnerability? So Linux users and Hackintoshers are safe?
...a roll-up flatbed scanner.
"Default" - the state of Windows configurations that need to be changed.
Very true. If they had branded them as "energy efficient speedbumps" I would have had no complaints. :-)
Yes, but that has no bearing on this system! If they mounted huge foam boxing gloves in each bay and encouraged drivers to stop by ramming them, perhaps that would allow the harvesting of otherwise-wasted energy, but as I keep trying to point out the energy being harvested here wouldn't be expended in the first place if the system wasn't there, and is paid for in its entirety by the customer while emitting its share of carbon despite all the "spin" saying it's free and ecologically neutral.
That only holds true if the car has to brake anyway. All the diagrams show these on the level...
And if they put in a downramp so the cars would be being slowed at the bottom you'd still waste the same amount of fuel driving the car back up the ramp to leave. Actually more, as the cars would now be fully laden with shopping...
In that case, the customers aren't being asked to pay for the sunshine. This is, in essence, the same as putting parking meters at every parking space and then using the income from that to buy electricity - they paid a one-off fee for the infrastructure in the knowledge that the customers would then pay them a steady income stream thereafter. Only the scale is different.