I used to type on a Model M and I used to love it, although I noticed that working on my laptop, once it's newness had warn off and I was used to it's key layout, I could type a bit faster... Then one day when I was at a previous company about 7 years ago, they when through this phase where they bought the cheapest everything, so when the crappy dell keyboard I had there died (spongy keys should be against the law!) they replaced it with a Logitech UltraX. My typing speeds went through the roof. From 75 wpm to well over 105 wpm. It just works. There's tactile feedback, the keys aren't spongy and you don't have to lift your fingers up a mile in the air to hit the row above, or into a pit for the row below, it's like a (good) laptop as far as distance and pressure required, but the keys and layout are 100% normal sized. I got so used to it I had to by one for home use afterwords as going home and back to an M was such a downgrade. Best of all, these things are around $20 for either a USB or PS2.
Agreed. This is personally a HUGE deal to me, and sorta makes owning a game pointless if I can't use it without being connected to the net. there are plenty of times the net goes down, or I'm on a laptop with a wireless connection that some how drops, or I'm in an airport or on a plane or wherever without access and I want to play.
Indeed. The person would have to have the ability to make more money back by taking it to court than going to work that day. Red light camera tickets are $50 around here now, and don't go on a person's record/don't get reported to insurance. just a straight $50 fine (that doesn't even go to the city/state/municipality anyway, just the company that installed the bloody things but that's another story...) So with this idea, I'd be $50 for me to pay it, or potentially $150 if they reverse it... I make quite a bit more than $150 a day, so there's no real point to argue this fine, logically speaking.
I'm glad you linked that. Was looking for the article VA did, listed on your link as #2: 2) The Impact of Red Light Cameras (Photo-Red Enforcement) on Crashes in Virginia Virginia Transportation Research Council June 2007
After this study, even though it shows that accidents went up and "The impact of cameras on injury severity is too close to call.â, they have decided to put the cameras back up and expand the number of intersections they're on...
I really think they're effectiveness is limited by the weight they carry as well... people still run red lights because they know if they get caught it's only going to be the possibility of a $50 fine, no points, no record, no 3 strikes, nothing. Also, it denys the right to face your accuser and they've been known to be abused by people who print out "fake plates" and run lights or speed past speed cameras. url:http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/691929/When_Pimping_Speed_Cameras_Goes_Horribly_Wrong.html for example.
Personally I think this is a huge waste of money since in VA Beach where they're being Reinstalled now, basically NONE of the ticket's profit goes to the city. They have paid a 3rd party to install, run, manage and get paid by the cameras. While this might be good from a lack of government involvement POV, it's without checks and balances from what I've read.
Colbert's gonna have to redo his song/DLC for Rockband "Charlene (I'm right behind you)" to add in "...I think of you when I'm watchin' you from the ISS far above you..."
IMHO the next obvious format is a microSD card with DRM free flac files... too bad the RIAA doesn't agree.
But that's probably one reason why CD sales drop due to "piracy". People would rather have encumbered music files on a tiny device such as a flash drive/stick/ipod nano/etc, than on a (by today's standards) Huge CD that is hard to carry and hard to play "on-the-go" and offers no benefit over flac/mp3/aac/whatever.
Personally I've backed up all of my music and it's one of the first things I do when I get a CD. Both for portability/ease of use, and for backup purposes.
I've heard similar claims for Win 2008, but I know personally that Windows 2003 was significantly faster in certain circumstances for normal desktop tasks (especially gaming) than XP at the time. Perhaps this is what they're going for here.
I agree... but if we made him change his name, then Robert Gates needs to change his, 'cause everytime I see a story heading "Gates says..." I'm like "Why would Bill say that? And who cares?
Why don't they wave their magic wand to make it all go away?
But before they do, they need to make sure they put the strap around their wrist and pull it tight, else their magic wand might fling out of their hand and break their precious plasma TV.
Seriously, when I upgraded to 95 from 3.11, it was slow, I needed a new PC.
95->98se wasn't bad.
I skipped ME, but when XP came out, it was slow as balls on that system. Upgraded to a new PC with XP... In the beginning it was sorta slow, but much faster than the last PC, patches and speed upgrades got me to the point where XP was flying.
Vista took it back a notch, but then I upgraded the PC and it's flying and with SP1, it's faster than my XP box was. Now Windows 7 is coming out. I'll probably skip it as it seems like it's just a unwanted rehash of Vista. But if I did go for it, it'd be considered standard operating procedure to upgrade the PC. at least drop in a faster chip or more RAM.
When you do more things, you take up more cpu/ram. You can't say that win 7 is going to do less than vista or xp because if it did do less it a.) wouldn't be an MS product and b.) no one would want it. People buy things because of what they do, rarely do they buy them based on what it doesn't do, unless that is "suck".
Sure there are some of us here, myself included, that'd love it if MS cut a bunch of crap out of the next version of windows. Cut memory usage by dropping back a lot of the unwanted features, or made all the features opt-in instead of installed by default. But that's not going to happen because "Joe 6-pack" will think that it's not part of his purchase and try to take it back when he really just needs to run the add/remove programs dialog. Besides, if they did that they'd be one step away from charging for those extra features.
I still think at this point MS just needs to focus on fixing the issues they think are in vista with SP's. XP was out for 5 years, Vista's been around for like 2.5. Everyone just started getting used to Vista, let's just let it slide. Everyone complained for the first few years of XP. I know I did. but now we're used to it. The same will happen with Vista, I've got it and now that I've seriously used it for a year+ I prefer it over XP. We don't need another OS.
I always figured this was one of the main reasons why the PS2 constantly outsells newer consoles... The games are cheap, they're still good, and the system's not that expensive either. It's a great combo and more companies need to realize it.
Personally, $20 is my sweet spot. I've spent more only once in the last 5 years (ironically when I had more disposable income) and that was with gift cards. I just don't think that they're worth $40-60 a pop. There have been times where I'd though "wow, this game is awesome" and I probably would have spent more on it if I'd have known before I got it that I'd be playing it for years, but I just don't know that before I've played it for years. Which is why I'd rather buy a game for $20 and then by extra content or expansions for a few bucks here and there. Something that the Rockband series has proven to me, as well as a number of FPS. The content tends to expand the enjoyment if done right.
Sad to say, that right there is probably the way it works.
Yes Dell builds them to custom spec. but they most likely don't have install images for Every combo of components let alone two sets, one with Vista and one with XP. So they take a base XP image and add the right drivers to it to work. Sure this is a small change, but it's a change and one that dell charges $20 for. Which considering the time added (gathering the right drivers for XP, perhaps changing the way they test features that the system has that older ones don't in XP instead of Vista), It seems pretty petty to argue over $20. If she doesn't like it, then she can order it without an OS (if they still offer that option) and buy her own copy for, oh yeah, more than they would have charged.
Customization always costs somewhere. They just pass that on to the customer. Though in all honesty $20 is a pretty good price for that. The Lenovo price quoted sounds closer to the real amount of work to me.
Pranking people with the speed cameras has already been done. Same has occurred with the red light cameras, though I don't have an easily copy/pasted link.
I'd also like to point out that this is GREAT for CREATING JOBS... all those people that worked the toll booths, hope you got other employment lined up!
Unless it's one of the new digital ones that Verizon and Cox Cable have rolled out (and no doubt many others) that use a battery backed cable modem to route phone traffic over the broadband network. The battery in ours is good for about 8 hours... tops. Doesn't really help in an emergency situation, and the last time we had one of those (Hurricane Isabelle), the cell towers came back up before the power did... if they went down at all. Unlike the phone lines, which around here are almost exclusively above ground and took a good sized hit in places.
This is not always the way layoffs work. Sure, it'd be good for the company to get rid of some of the people who were, as you said, sub-average. But in the situation I was in, the company had two major products. The board/CEO/Investors decided that one of them was not making them money. The people who worked on that one project had been there for years, some of them are the best of the best. Great people and great coders. Since they were not part of the surviving product, they were cut, 60% of the company (small company, about 40-50 before the cuts).
Typically you fire people who suck, you lay off people when you need to save money, yet there's no good other reason to cut the person.
However, I agree, if you're good you can probably find a new gig pretty quick. The part of the layoffs that suck is really about change and forced career shifts. I for one found other work quickly, and even came out with 1/3rd more money than I previously made before being laid off. But I liked that job, and I'm glad for the opportunity.
Am I the only one that doesn't really WANT video calls from a cell phone? Sure they have their place I suppose. A business meeting connecting two conference rooms with video/audio, but when I'm talking on a cell phone I just want to talk, I don't want to have to hold thing thing away from me so the camera can have just the right view, worrying about what's going on around me and if it'll show up on the screen or if I'm really in focus and all that. It's a cell phone. On average my cell calls are like 4 minutes tops. There's absolutely no point for video of me in some store as the wife tells me we need eggs too. Or for the people unlike me that talk in the car... as if they can hold the camera right, talk on the phone AND drive. A hands free thing isn't going to help that. These people can barely drive correctly in the first place.
I'd say that they could do this already with a bluetooth handset and the current 3G iPhone facing the other way (it's got a camera on the back, and when you're using bluetooth it doesn't matter what the phone orientation is.) but the iPhone camera doesn't work with video as it stands. Not sure if it's a software limitation, or a hardware limitation. I know of a few other phones that weren't able to do video until a few firmware/OS updates. Maybe they can just do that and be done with this so people like me can keep on NOT using it.
In other news, sales of bottled water, milk, eggs and bread skyrocketed in hell today as citizens prepare for a wave of snowfall that could possibly last for weeks.
(And if anyone was wondering, apparently everyone who stocks up on eggs, milk and bread are going to try to use french toast for their entire food source...)
I'm with you. I've had nothing but the best of luck with WD. Hell, I still have a 15GB drive that until a year ago was basically on 24/7 since I got it in '98 and haven't had any issues with it.
Even at the worst of times with WD, I'd have to say it's no worse than Seagate or Maxtor. Though recently I've moved to Seagate due to their SAS (and sorta SAS ES2 models) Superiority. I'd still put 'em in Desktops.
While I completely agree with pretty much everything you said there you also have to remember that just because they have the patent doesn't mean they're the only ones that can make such a product... plenty of other people can too.... they just have to give Apple a kickback for it. This has happened for a number of patents. A little money to the person that holds the patent for the ability to use the IP and they can use it too. It just drives up the price of competitors due to that cash for licensing the patent.
I suppose this spells some doom for the Palm Pre... though I do have to wonder about all the prior art of the Palm Pilots, though IANAL, and I didn't read the 358 page doc either.
I guess I won't be able to upgrade to a new Geode when this one dies. I'd have to say the little thing works quite well, 4 sata ports, software raid-5, tons o' storage, running a webserver and numerous other servers... Oh well, AMD looses another customer I suppose.
Wow. Sucks to be your board. I don't think I've ever had any big problems with BIOSes on desktop boards (or even on server boards passed the "a few updates after public release" point. My current setup doesn't have ANY that I know of, or care about... and newer versions of the BIOS simply add support for newer procs/stepping.
Now on server boards, I've only really had problems with boards from Tyan. Though mostly it was because they mislabeled things or couldn't spell ("CPU1 FAN DOESN'T DETECTED" comes to mind, when there's only one CPU in the system. luckily it wasn't a fatal error.) Everything would work once they got their boards to a certian code rev, but that was really only something we saw where I worked because we got pre-pre-pre-pre-production boards with wires running along the board for traces they missed/forgot) Usually everything is ironed out before they go public. At least IMHO. And I've worked with a few hundred boards if not more.
So then I'd like to know how stable these things are for server & 24/7 environments. Is this the kinda thing I'd want to put on that pre-pre-pre-release board to make it work without having to wait for the vendor to udpate their stuff? Sounds kinda iffy to me.
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I used to type on a Model M and I used to love it, although I noticed that working on my laptop, once it's newness had warn off and I was used to it's key layout, I could type a bit faster... Then one day when I was at a previous company about 7 years ago, they when through this phase where they bought the cheapest everything, so when the crappy dell keyboard I had there died (spongy keys should be against the law!) they replaced it with a Logitech UltraX. My typing speeds went through the roof. From 75 wpm to well over 105 wpm. It just works. There's tactile feedback, the keys aren't spongy and you don't have to lift your fingers up a mile in the air to hit the row above, or into a pit for the row below, it's like a (good) laptop as far as distance and pressure required, but the keys and layout are 100% normal sized. I got so used to it I had to by one for home use afterwords as going home and back to an M was such a downgrade. Best of all, these things are around $20 for either a USB or PS2.
Agreed. This is personally a HUGE deal to me, and sorta makes owning a game pointless if I can't use it without being connected to the net. there are plenty of times the net goes down, or I'm on a laptop with a wireless connection that some how drops, or I'm in an airport or on a plane or wherever without access and I want to play.
Indeed. The person would have to have the ability to make more money back by taking it to court than going to work that day. Red light camera tickets are $50 around here now, and don't go on a person's record/don't get reported to insurance. just a straight $50 fine (that doesn't even go to the city/state/municipality anyway, just the company that installed the bloody things but that's another story...) So with this idea, I'd be $50 for me to pay it, or potentially $150 if they reverse it... I make quite a bit more than $150 a day, so there's no real point to argue this fine, logically speaking.
I'm glad you linked that. Was looking for the article VA did, listed on your link as #2: 2) The Impact of Red Light Cameras (Photo-Red Enforcement) on Crashes in Virginia
Virginia Transportation Research Council
June 2007
After this study, even though it shows that accidents went up and "The impact of cameras on injury severity is too close to call.â, they have decided to put the cameras back up and expand the number of intersections they're on...
I really think they're effectiveness is limited by the weight they carry as well... people still run red lights because they know if they get caught it's only going to be the possibility of a $50 fine, no points, no record, no 3 strikes, nothing. Also, it denys the right to face your accuser and they've been known to be abused by people who print out "fake plates" and run lights or speed past speed cameras. url:http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/691929/When_Pimping_Speed_Cameras_Goes_Horribly_Wrong.html for example.
Personally I think this is a huge waste of money since in VA Beach where they're being Reinstalled now, basically NONE of the ticket's profit goes to the city. They have paid a 3rd party to install, run, manage and get paid by the cameras. While this might be good from a lack of government involvement POV, it's without checks and balances from what I've read.
Colbert's gonna have to redo his song/DLC for Rockband "Charlene (I'm right behind you)" to add in "...I think of you when I'm watchin' you from the ISS far above you..."
tar, cpio, and dump do incremental backups... and they're easily scheduled with cron jobs...
Just saying...
IMHO the next obvious format is a microSD card with DRM free flac files... too bad the RIAA doesn't agree.
But that's probably one reason why CD sales drop due to "piracy". People would rather have encumbered music files on a tiny device such as a flash drive/stick/ipod nano/etc, than on a (by today's standards) Huge CD that is hard to carry and hard to play "on-the-go" and offers no benefit over flac/mp3/aac/whatever.
Personally I've backed up all of my music and it's one of the first things I do when I get a CD. Both for portability/ease of use, and for backup purposes.
Are you saying that Em Emalb IS Frank West? He's covered wars, ya know?
I've heard similar claims for Win 2008, but I know personally that Windows 2003 was significantly faster in certain circumstances for normal desktop tasks (especially gaming) than XP at the time. Perhaps this is what they're going for here.
I agree... but if we made him change his name, then Robert Gates needs to change his, 'cause everytime I see a story heading "Gates says..." I'm like "Why would Bill say that? And who cares?
Why don't they wave their magic wand to make it all go away?
But before they do, they need to make sure they put the strap around their wrist and pull it tight, else their magic wand might fling out of their hand and break their precious plasma TV.
Seriously, when I upgraded to 95 from 3.11, it was slow, I needed a new PC.
95->98se wasn't bad.
I skipped ME, but when XP came out, it was slow as balls on that system. Upgraded to a new PC with XP... In the beginning it was sorta slow, but much faster than the last PC, patches and speed upgrades got me to the point where XP was flying.
Vista took it back a notch, but then I upgraded the PC and it's flying and with SP1, it's faster than my XP box was.
Now Windows 7 is coming out. I'll probably skip it as it seems like it's just a unwanted rehash of Vista. But if I did go for it, it'd be considered standard operating procedure to upgrade the PC. at least drop in a faster chip or more RAM.
When you do more things, you take up more cpu/ram. You can't say that win 7 is going to do less than vista or xp because if it did do less it a.) wouldn't be an MS product and b.) no one would want it. People buy things because of what they do, rarely do they buy them based on what it doesn't do, unless that is "suck".
Sure there are some of us here, myself included, that'd love it if MS cut a bunch of crap out of the next version of windows. Cut memory usage by dropping back a lot of the unwanted features, or made all the features opt-in instead of installed by default. But that's not going to happen because "Joe 6-pack" will think that it's not part of his purchase and try to take it back when he really just needs to run the add/remove programs dialog. Besides, if they did that they'd be one step away from charging for those extra features.
I still think at this point MS just needs to focus on fixing the issues they think are in vista with SP's. XP was out for 5 years, Vista's been around for like 2.5. Everyone just started getting used to Vista, let's just let it slide. Everyone complained for the first few years of XP. I know I did. but now we're used to it. The same will happen with Vista, I've got it and now that I've seriously used it for a year+ I prefer it over XP. We don't need another OS.
Apparently we have a need for Mega Maid... hopefully she won't go from suck to blow.
I always figured this was one of the main reasons why the PS2 constantly outsells newer consoles... The games are cheap, they're still good, and the system's not that expensive either. It's a great combo and more companies need to realize it.
Personally, $20 is my sweet spot. I've spent more only once in the last 5 years (ironically when I had more disposable income) and that was with gift cards. I just don't think that they're worth $40-60 a pop. There have been times where I'd though "wow, this game is awesome" and I probably would have spent more on it if I'd have known before I got it that I'd be playing it for years, but I just don't know that before I've played it for years. Which is why I'd rather buy a game for $20 and then by extra content or expansions for a few bucks here and there. Something that the Rockband series has proven to me, as well as a number of FPS. The content tends to expand the enjoyment if done right.
Indeed, perhaps:
if ($car->allowed_to_be_here!=1) { fireMissles(); }
Or even:
if (!allowedToBeHere($car)) { fireMissles(); }
Sad to say, that right there is probably the way it works.
Yes Dell builds them to custom spec. but they most likely don't have install images for Every combo of components let alone two sets, one with Vista and one with XP. So they take a base XP image and add the right drivers to it to work. Sure this is a small change, but it's a change and one that dell charges $20 for. Which considering the time added (gathering the right drivers for XP, perhaps changing the way they test features that the system has that older ones don't in XP instead of Vista), It seems pretty petty to argue over $20. If she doesn't like it, then she can order it without an OS (if they still offer that option) and buy her own copy for, oh yeah, more than they would have charged.
Customization always costs somewhere. They just pass that on to the customer. Though in all honesty $20 is a pretty good price for that. The Lenovo price quoted sounds closer to the real amount of work to me.
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/26/2632.asp
Pranking people with the speed cameras has already been done. Same has occurred with the red light cameras, though I don't have an easily copy/pasted link.
I'd also like to point out that this is GREAT for CREATING JOBS... all those people that worked the toll booths, hope you got other employment lined up!
Unless it's one of the new digital ones that Verizon and Cox Cable have rolled out (and no doubt many others) that use a battery backed cable modem to route phone traffic over the broadband network. The battery in ours is good for about 8 hours... tops. Doesn't really help in an emergency situation, and the last time we had one of those (Hurricane Isabelle), the cell towers came back up before the power did... if they went down at all. Unlike the phone lines, which around here are almost exclusively above ground and took a good sized hit in places.
This is not always the way layoffs work. Sure, it'd be good for the company to get rid of some of the people who were, as you said, sub-average. But in the situation I was in, the company had two major products. The board/CEO/Investors decided that one of them was not making them money. The people who worked on that one project had been there for years, some of them are the best of the best. Great people and great coders. Since they were not part of the surviving product, they were cut, 60% of the company (small company, about 40-50 before the cuts).
Typically you fire people who suck, you lay off people when you need to save money, yet there's no good other reason to cut the person.
However, I agree, if you're good you can probably find a new gig pretty quick. The part of the layoffs that suck is really about change and forced career shifts. I for one found other work quickly, and even came out with 1/3rd more money than I previously made before being laid off. But I liked that job, and I'm glad for the opportunity.
Am I the only one that doesn't really WANT video calls from a cell phone? Sure they have their place I suppose. A business meeting connecting two conference rooms with video/audio, but when I'm talking on a cell phone I just want to talk, I don't want to have to hold thing thing away from me so the camera can have just the right view, worrying about what's going on around me and if it'll show up on the screen or if I'm really in focus and all that. It's a cell phone. On average my cell calls are like 4 minutes tops. There's absolutely no point for video of me in some store as the wife tells me we need eggs too. Or for the people unlike me that talk in the car... as if they can hold the camera right, talk on the phone AND drive. A hands free thing isn't going to help that. These people can barely drive correctly in the first place.
I'd say that they could do this already with a bluetooth handset and the current 3G iPhone facing the other way (it's got a camera on the back, and when you're using bluetooth it doesn't matter what the phone orientation is.) but the iPhone camera doesn't work with video as it stands. Not sure if it's a software limitation, or a hardware limitation. I know of a few other phones that weren't able to do video until a few firmware/OS updates. Maybe they can just do that and be done with this so people like me can keep on NOT using it.
You mean Legislators did something Right??
In other news, sales of bottled water, milk, eggs and bread skyrocketed in hell today as citizens prepare for a wave of snowfall that could possibly last for weeks.
(And if anyone was wondering, apparently everyone who stocks up on eggs, milk and bread are going to try to use french toast for their entire food source...)
I'm with you. I've had nothing but the best of luck with WD. Hell, I still have a 15GB drive that until a year ago was basically on 24/7 since I got it in '98 and haven't had any issues with it.
Even at the worst of times with WD, I'd have to say it's no worse than Seagate or Maxtor. Though recently I've moved to Seagate due to their SAS (and sorta SAS ES2 models) Superiority. I'd still put 'em in Desktops.
While I completely agree with pretty much everything you said there you also have to remember that just because they have the patent doesn't mean they're the only ones that can make such a product... plenty of other people can too.... they just have to give Apple a kickback for it. This has happened for a number of patents. A little money to the person that holds the patent for the ability to use the IP and they can use it too. It just drives up the price of competitors due to that cash for licensing the patent.
I suppose this spells some doom for the Palm Pre... though I do have to wonder about all the prior art of the Palm Pilots, though IANAL, and I didn't read the 358 page doc either.
I guess I won't be able to upgrade to a new Geode when this one dies. I'd have to say the little thing works quite well, 4 sata ports, software raid-5, tons o' storage, running a webserver and numerous other servers... Oh well, AMD looses another customer I suppose.
Wow. Sucks to be your board. I don't think I've ever had any big problems with BIOSes on desktop boards (or even on server boards passed the "a few updates after public release" point. My current setup doesn't have ANY that I know of, or care about... and newer versions of the BIOS simply add support for newer procs/stepping.
Now on server boards, I've only really had problems with boards from Tyan. Though mostly it was because they mislabeled things or couldn't spell ("CPU1 FAN DOESN'T DETECTED" comes to mind, when there's only one CPU in the system. luckily it wasn't a fatal error.) Everything would work once they got their boards to a certian code rev, but that was really only something we saw where I worked because we got pre-pre-pre-pre-production boards with wires running along the board for traces they missed/forgot) Usually everything is ironed out before they go public. At least IMHO. And I've worked with a few hundred boards if not more.
So then I'd like to know how stable these things are for server & 24/7 environments. Is this the kinda thing I'd want to put on that pre-pre-pre-release board to make it work without having to wait for the vendor to udpate their stuff? Sounds kinda iffy to me.