Heh... Via makes crap products anyway... perhaps a blessing in disguise?:)
Seriously... when your new motherboard doesn't recognize your FLOPPY DRIVE no matter which way you plug it in, and you take it back and buy a mobo made by someone else and the floppy works fine... that doesn't bode well for whoever made the dodgy motherboard. I've never spoken to anyone who felt anything but antipathy towards Via.
Gemstar is a crappy company. They want $10 an incident for tech support where the VCR+ is concerned. It really is quite ridiculous. For them to go patent this technology and slam other companies for coming up with similar stuff is ludicrous - obviously they can't find any better way to make money.
I think the main reason for a corporation to use SCSI is the simple fact that you *can* have 7 or 15 drives on one chain, where IDE only allows 2.
We use SCSI here at work, but we're replacing it fairly quickly with fibre channel, which is a bit faster. And a fibre channel connector is only 4 wires. THAT'S what I call high-performance serial!
Fibre channel is the way to go if you need enormous throughput and you've got the money. You can fit four shelves of ten disks each (yes, I went and counted) on ONE CARD.
As far as I know, they sell backup software, but they don't actually write it - it's someone else's that they slap their label on.
Kind of like when you sit in a Ford Escort and then you sit in a Mercury whatever-it's-called and you notice they're exactly the same? That's what I'm talking about.
No IDE ports? Laughable. People still want IDE. It often costs 1/3 of SCSI. If you don't need the extra performance, why pay for it? They'd be shooting themselves in the foot to do that.
Not to mention that their target market is largely portable devices. Does a laptop need support for seven hard drives? What's that you say? NO? Astounding! I thought everyone wanted to pay MORE for a laptop!
External ports! Everyone in the world is obviously lugging a huge scanner around with their 5-lb. laptop. So let's build all our laptops to suit a market of 800 people and try to sell them to a market of 50,000 people!!! It makes perfect sense!!!#$%@#!$#$%!#$%;LKAHSDF;LASKDG;L
Agreed. I have a 540MB Caviar from 1995(4?) that I got with a 486/100. It still works great. I've used it as everything from a main (everything) drive to a swap drive, never any problems. I honestly don't know where all these SCSI bigots are coming up with their reliability claims. I work for a large ISP and we lose SCSI drives from time to time.
What in the hell are you talking about? Minidiscs ARE CD quality! A 128k MP3 has nothing on a Minidisc. Go get a player before you start talking smack about technology you don't understand.
Nice offer... but an address off dynip.com? Sounds like either a dialup or some PPP over Ethernet type deal.
From PacBell you can get five usable IPs and the service agreement says you can run servers. I got that and I get to run my own domain, with reverse DNS even.:)
Still, it is gracious of whoever that is to offer free shells. I just wouldn't rely on it is all.
Media companies have to come up with better ways of distributing music than CDs. I like MP3s because you can get just what you want. How many CDs do we all have with 2 songs we like, and 10 we never want to hear again? I figure that if I have to pay $18 for a CD to get two songs, that the rest is cruft and I feel somewhat perversely entitled to get free stuff from that artist because I'm never going to listen to the other crap on the CD anyway.
Also, I don't really care for artists like Puff Daddy pissing and moaning about how Napster is so offensive and that using it is "stealing." What's that you say? Four Rolls Royces aren't enough and you need a fifth one to complement the $3,000,000 summer cottage? Some more whores and crack and doobies? Right away, guv'nor! Shall I fetch your riding linens as well?
I remember when the Wherehouse used to have a giant machine with literally thousands of music titles stored on tape inside. You'd go through a catalogue, write down the numbers corresponding to the songs you wanted, hand it to a clerk, and s/he'd pop a blank tape into the giant machine and five or ten minutes later you'd have a custom tape with just what you wanted for something like $15-$20 (each song would cost $1.00 or $2.00 or whatever). If they brought that back today and offered Minidisc rather than just tape output, that would be the best. I'd rather spend $20 to get a minidisc with all the really, really, really good stuff on it, and REALLY have it at CD quality, than spend five or six hours scrounging all that stuff up on crappy-sounding 128-kilobit mp3s.
Plus, the music industry would probably be happy about the serial copy management system, which ostensibly prevents hooking up two MD players over optical cable and making perfect (serial) copies. (Not that no one has ever found a way of bypassing this, but still...)
Re:Offtopic: Clarke and Lovecraft
on
Childhood's End
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· Score: 1
I liked At The Mountains of Madness. I also thought that Through The Gate(s?) of the Silver Key and the attached stores tied the whole Randolph Carter line together. The idea of the universe being one nameless entity and all of our experiences being nothing more than a particular cross-section of that entity fascinates me.
Try reading 3001. They actually bring back someone from 2001! It's fairly r33t.
I must agree. I read this book several years ago. It's one of the few books I'd ever consider reading again. Another would have to be The Dream-Quest Of Unknown Kadath by HP Lovecraft.
I think that a good percentage of people who mainly use Linux but also dual-boot into Windows have that Windows partition there primarily for games (and possibly family members who aren't savvy). Am I right here, gang? iD and Loki aside, most game developers release for Windows first, then maybe Mac, and Linux if they feel like it.
The 6502, Z80, 68020 and below, etc. don't have support for memory protection. You'd have to get rid of the linux MMU.
Good thing it's already been done here. Of course, the Linux kernel, even when stripped down to the bare essentials, will need exponentially more memory than 4K... try 500K.
I just had another thought. They almost certainly won't respect the GPL.
The US doesn't play ball forever with governments that spurn international intellectual property rights. If they try to screw us over by not releasing the "red flag" distro with full sources, that's going to be one more big red mark against them. Couple that with infanticide and other human rights violations...
I'm going to write my congressman today and tell him that I oppose this idea of the US granting favored trading status to China. Let's give it to Australia or some other country that isn't run by pinko commie bastards. Communism has been proved wrong (and stupid) multitudinous times. With capitalism, you have a few really rich people, a lot of middle-class people, and a smaller amount of poor people. With communism, you have the government, the military, and the civilians, a few of whom are rich, but most of whom are poor; most live in squalor.
Cut their pipe and tell them they can have it back when the Chinese government is run by the people, not the commie turds.
They can't read CNN. The commies running the place have most Internet sites blocked. Basically, anything that might talk smack about the Chinese government is off-limits.
I'd like to see the access control lists they use on their border routers...
I agree, somewhat. I've never found any of them funny enough to laugh at. Some of them make me groan. When Dust Puppy raps "NT's not up to snuff", I want to attack it with a bottle of hair remover. I think Illiad is the kind of guy who would file the kind of police report that begins with "I heard someone defaming Linux across the street!"
Some of the cartoons are just stupid.
On the other hand, most of the storylines are interesting.
Back on topic, I did tech support for almost a year, and I find that some users are worthy of an occasional lampooning. Once I had this lady in New York. She'd dial into an access number and get dead air. We'd dial into it from our HQ on the west coast and get a carrier tone. She kept insisting that it must be something wrong with the number and flatly refused to call the phone company. Then she calls back two more times and yells at the reps about how much she hated the last techs who she spoke with. Still no call to the phone company. Gah.
Then there are the old folks who make a silly mistake and then laugh at themselves. God bless 'em, you just want to pat them on the back through the phone.
Then there are the "twilight zone" calls (i.e. the customer is drunk and taking a leak in the back yard with the cordless phone when you answer the call, or doped up after a root canal, or brain damaged, or whatever).
The ones that talk sh!t and yell at you make the job really hard.
That, and the MCSEs who won't let you tell them where to put DNS numbers into a dialup networking connectoid, then three minutes later they ask you how. If people would stop trying to impress tech support reps with their knowledge (which is almost never necessary to the call) and just be the technician's eyes, ears, and hands, a lot less technicians would quit their jobs after six months.
Uhm... just for the sake of accuracy... the sun does not transmit heat to the Earth. Heat is a measure of the activity of molecules, which are pretty damned thin between Sol and here. It is only after the LIGHT it transmits to us hits molecules in the atmosphere and on the ground/the ocean that the photons impart motion (heat) to the various elements of our planet. That is why seasons are influenced by the angle of sunlight rather than distance to the sun; it is winter in the northern hemisphere and yet summer in the southern hemisphere, and mountains (highlands) have climates which differ from the climates of surrounding lowlands - it has nothing to do with how close we are, and everything to do with how much air the sunlight has to travel through to get to the ground.
Someone did a presentation in a math class I took a while ago about an experiment earlier in this century. They weren't looking to prove the theory of relativity, but they did want to figure out the speed of light.
Southern California has all sorts of mountains and foothills. One half of the team went to Mt. Wilson, the other half to a smaller mountian some miles to the south. One team had a large wheel with mirrors on it, and the other had a powerful light source. The wheel was rotated at a predetermined interval, which caused light to be reflected back to the other team intermittantly. The time it took for the light to return was measured, and from that, the c portion of e=mc^2 was derived. Has anyone else heard of this experiment?
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Seriously... when your new motherboard doesn't recognize your FLOPPY DRIVE no matter which way you plug it in, and you take it back and buy a mobo made by someone else and the floppy works fine... that doesn't bode well for whoever made the dodgy motherboard. I've never spoken to anyone who felt anything but antipathy towards Via.
Gemstar is a crappy company. They want $10 an incident for tech support where the VCR+ is concerned. It really is quite ridiculous. For them to go patent this technology and slam other companies for coming up with similar stuff is ludicrous - obviously they can't find any better way to make money.
We use SCSI here at work, but we're replacing it fairly quickly with fibre channel, which is a bit faster. And a fibre channel connector is only 4 wires. THAT'S what I call high-performance serial!
Fibre channel is the way to go if you need enormous throughput and you've got the money. You can fit four shelves of ten disks each (yes, I went and counted) on ONE CARD.
Ars Technica has an _excellent_ review of SCSI drive technologies. I found it extremely useful.
I've got a WD Caviar that's more than 5 years old and it still works. I have several Maxtor drives dating from 1996 and every one of them still works.
Kind of like when you sit in a Ford Escort and then you sit in a Mercury whatever-it's-called and you notice they're exactly the same? That's what I'm talking about.
Not to mention that their target market is largely portable devices. Does a laptop need support for seven hard drives? What's that you say? NO? Astounding! I thought everyone wanted to pay MORE for a laptop!
External ports! Everyone in the world is obviously lugging a huge scanner around with their 5-lb. laptop. So let's build all our laptops to suit a market of 800 people and try to sell them to a market of 50,000 people!!! It makes perfect sense!!!#$%@#!$#$%!#$%;LKAHSDF;LASKDG;L
Agreed. I have a 540MB Caviar from 1995(4?) that I got with a 486/100. It still works great. I've used it as everything from a main (everything) drive to a swap drive, never any problems. I honestly don't know where all these SCSI bigots are coming up with their reliability claims. I work for a large ISP and we lose SCSI drives from time to time.
What in the hell are you talking about? Minidiscs ARE CD quality! A 128k MP3 has nothing on a Minidisc. Go get a player before you start talking smack about technology you don't understand.
From PacBell you can get five usable IPs and the service agreement says you can run servers. I got that and I get to run my own domain, with reverse DNS even. :)
Still, it is gracious of whoever that is to offer free shells. I just wouldn't rely on it is all.
Also, I don't really care for artists like Puff Daddy pissing and moaning about how Napster is so offensive and that using it is "stealing." What's that you say? Four Rolls Royces aren't enough and you need a fifth one to complement the $3,000,000 summer cottage? Some more whores and crack and doobies? Right away, guv'nor! Shall I fetch your riding linens as well?
I remember when the Wherehouse used to have a giant machine with literally thousands of music titles stored on tape inside. You'd go through a catalogue, write down the numbers corresponding to the songs you wanted, hand it to a clerk, and s/he'd pop a blank tape into the giant machine and five or ten minutes later you'd have a custom tape with just what you wanted for something like $15-$20 (each song would cost $1.00 or $2.00 or whatever). If they brought that back today and offered Minidisc rather than just tape output, that would be the best. I'd rather spend $20 to get a minidisc with all the really, really, really good stuff on it, and REALLY have it at CD quality, than spend five or six hours scrounging all that stuff up on crappy-sounding 128-kilobit mp3s.
Plus, the music industry would probably be happy about the serial copy management system, which ostensibly prevents hooking up two MD players over optical cable and making perfect (serial) copies. (Not that no one has ever found a way of bypassing this, but still...)
Try reading 3001. They actually bring back someone from 2001! It's fairly r33t.
I must agree. I read this book several years ago. It's one of the few books I'd ever consider reading again. Another would have to be The Dream-Quest Of Unknown Kadath by HP Lovecraft.
I think that a good percentage of people who mainly use Linux but also dual-boot into Windows have that Windows partition there primarily for games (and possibly family members who aren't savvy). Am I right here, gang? iD and Loki aside, most game developers release for Windows first, then maybe Mac, and Linux if they feel like it.
Good thing it's already been done here. Of course, the Linux kernel, even when stripped down to the bare essentials, will need exponentially more memory than 4K... try 500K.
The US doesn't play ball forever with governments that spurn international intellectual property rights. If they try to screw us over by not releasing the "red flag" distro with full sources, that's going to be one more big red mark against them. Couple that with infanticide and other human rights violations...
I'm going to write my congressman today and tell him that I oppose this idea of the US granting favored trading status to China. Let's give it to Australia or some other country that isn't run by pinko commie bastards. Communism has been proved wrong (and stupid) multitudinous times. With capitalism, you have a few really rich people, a lot of middle-class people, and a smaller amount of poor people. With communism, you have the government, the military, and the civilians, a few of whom are rich, but most of whom are poor; most live in squalor.
Cut their pipe and tell them they can have it back when the Chinese government is run by the people, not the commie turds.
I'd like to see the access control lists they use on their border routers...
"It's your turn to attack the capitalist pigs, comrade!"
I honestly don't know why we are willing to have anything to do with them.
Songs about an OS sucking are not geeky. They're NERDY. They're what make people look at us and think, "JESUS GOD, THESE PEOPLE NEED TO GET A LIFE."
Linux is an O/S, not a lifestyle.
Some of the cartoons are just stupid.
On the other hand, most of the storylines are interesting.
Back on topic, I did tech support for almost a year, and I find that some users are worthy of an occasional lampooning. Once I had this lady in New York. She'd dial into an access number and get dead air. We'd dial into it from our HQ on the west coast and get a carrier tone. She kept insisting that it must be something wrong with the number and flatly refused to call the phone company. Then she calls back two more times and yells at the reps about how much she hated the last techs who she spoke with. Still no call to the phone company. Gah.
Then there are the old folks who make a silly mistake and then laugh at themselves. God bless 'em, you just want to pat them on the back through the phone.
Then there are the "twilight zone" calls (i.e. the customer is drunk and taking a leak in the back yard with the cordless phone when you answer the call, or doped up after a root canal, or brain damaged, or whatever).
The ones that talk sh!t and yell at you make the job really hard.
That, and the MCSEs who won't let you tell them where to put DNS numbers into a dialup networking connectoid, then three minutes later they ask you how. If people would stop trying to impress tech support reps with their knowledge (which is almost never necessary to the call) and just be the technician's eyes, ears, and hands, a lot less technicians would quit their jobs after six months.
Heh, I found it too. :) http://www.mtwilson.edu/History/cal88/cal0388.html
Uhm... just for the sake of accuracy... the sun does not transmit heat to the Earth. Heat is a measure of the activity of molecules, which are pretty damned thin between Sol and here. It is only after the LIGHT it transmits to us hits molecules in the atmosphere and on the ground/the ocean that the photons impart motion (heat) to the various elements of our planet. That is why seasons are influenced by the angle of sunlight rather than distance to the sun; it is winter in the northern hemisphere and yet summer in the southern hemisphere, and mountains (highlands) have climates which differ from the climates of surrounding lowlands - it has nothing to do with how close we are, and everything to do with how much air the sunlight has to travel through to get to the ground.
Or Chinese year 4xxx...
They were not gods, there are no gods, and you're still dumb.
Southern California has all sorts of mountains and foothills. One half of the team went to Mt. Wilson, the other half to a smaller mountian some miles to the south. One team had a large wheel with mirrors on it, and the other had a powerful light source. The wheel was rotated at a predetermined interval, which caused light to be reflected back to the other team intermittantly. The time it took for the light to return was measured, and from that, the c portion of e=mc^2 was derived. Has anyone else heard of this experiment?