Ok, let's start with the obvious. sarcasm - Since I'm in the USA, What's a Kilogram? Now on to some paranoia. The real purpose of this is so they can gradually devalue the kg as necessary. They took us off the gold standard in 1963/1964, and all the other SI units are based upon things an average person can't measure or compare, so if they eliminate the physical kg reference cylinders, then they can gradually change the "standard" at will and we'll all get lighter (or heavier) and an ounce of gold won't be the same./sarcasm
Of course, as someone who (deludes himself into thinking he) knows something about science, I'm completely in favor of defining a kg upon something that won't vary (even a trivial amount) over time. As such, this is a good plan.
As a bonus, it frees up 36kg of platinum and 4kg of iridium, both of which are in short supply. Which brings up one final question, how much can the US get by selling 1.8kg of platinum and.2kg of iridium?
Tell them to try Chrome. Users don't need any special permission to install it into their own profile. Of course, their IT Dept could push out an administrative install, which would be a lot smarter on their part, but user's can install Chrome without any special access.
Correct. The lesson to be learned is this: "don't design software or business processes around a single vendor/product solution." When you have a good software architect, you can take advantage of vendor specific advantages and technologies without getting tied to a specific vendor/product/version.
Here's an example of getting benefit from a single vendor's advantages without tying yourself to that vendor: Starting in 1989, I designed and wrote a high performance, multi-user app, part of which was an OLTP system that ran 24/7 for 19+ years. I designed and implemented it as a DOS app on a Novell Netware 3.x network, but there was nothing about the design or implementation that required Netware. Over the years, we tested it with various Windows servers and Linux running Samba, and it worked there also. We kept it on Netware for the entire time because it was significantly faster than on a Windows network with Linux/Samba performance in-between those two, and because the Netware server was very stable. We were never locked in to Netware, but we did get to take advantage of the performance and stability benefits. We did upgrade to Netware 4.2, and most user workstations were upgraded to Win 3.11, Win95, WinNT4, Win2k, or WinXP over the years. Some of the user interaction portions were replaced with Windows apps to provide more flexibility, but they were also independent of the network/server. And, we had the benefits of Novell's NDS for years before (and after) MS created AD
MS made several errors with IE6: making it non-standard, integrating it into the OS, and encouraging people to write apps for it using ActiveX. All of which were intended to lock the customer into Windows. If it weren't for trying to integrate it into the OS, MS could simply let enterprises install it on a newer version of Windows. They would still have the slow IE6 engine with all it's security issues, but for an in-house app, that's manageable. Instead, they're trapped on XP until they rewrite/replace those IE6 specific apps, so MS has to continue to support XP and IE6, while the enterprises are not upgrading to Win7. Poor choices, bad design. All due a few completely predictable and preventable failures of software design by both MS and the enterprises who created critical processes tied to IE6 and ActiveX.
I agree. And, I've never spent $700 on an office chair. The chair I sit in as I type this is a fully (8-way) adjustable office chair. It's sturdy and comfortable. Normally $250 at Office Depot, I paid $100 (brand new) on clearance. I've worked at companies who spent $500--$700 per chair for office chairs, they weren't any more comfortable, adjustable, or durable than this one. At least 10% of the pneumatic height adjusters were broken within 5 years, along with a smaller portion of other adjustments. Mine is leather, the $500+ ones were fabric. As someone else suggested, have the students in wood and metal shop making and/or repairing the chairs and desks, it would be a valuable learning experience and would save some money.
No one needs a $700 office chair, certainly not school children who will abuse it. Not to mention how much time would be lost simply playing with adjustments on any type of adjustable chair. Keep it simple, durable, and cheap. Give them tables that are tall enough to allow standing, and chairs/stools to match that table height.
Spend the money on competent teachers. Spend money on people who actually teach, not just deliver information. People who make the subject interesting and relevant to the students. People who encourage the students to learn and explore the topic. People who are more interested in inquiring into a topic and getting students to think than they are in making sure students memorize a bunch of stuff that they can google anytime the need it in the real world.
Even spend some money on equipment and multi-media teaching tools. Multi-media makes it more interesting and enhances learning and retention. Show Mythbusters on occasion in science classes, and then have the kids test some myths they can safely test. Entertain people while they're learning, they'll remember more and want to learn more. I learned more and remember more about the US Civil war from a 2-3 hour program on the History Channel than I did in all the classroom and book time I spent on it in school (and that was a lot more than 3 hours).
Make classes interesting, and students will want to be in class and learn. Scores, literacy, and graduation rates will go up. $700 chairs will only drain the budget for things that will actually make a difference.
Any organization small enough to have trouble funding and domain controller Doesn't need one.
He said nothing about it being small. Apparently you missed the part about it being a "volunteer" organization. Anyone who ever worked with non-profit or volunteer organizations understands that size and budget are two completely different things.
I think the answer might just be to try renegotiating your price or specs.
That is the right idea. Since you (the original poster) apparently know hardware pretty well, spend your time researching and recommending the best Dell machine and configuration. Choose a machine with the right chipset, memory capacity (e.g. how many free memory slots will you have in your standard config), CPU, video, hard disk, and I/O slot/ports, and you'll have a machine that will likely be useful for 4-8 years. You may even find that you can reduce the cost to $900 or even $800 by choosing the configuration that is appropriate for your current and expected work load. If a $1000 machine lasts 5-10 years (and I've done that successfully at a number of clients), it's very cost effective for the client, and it beats the heck out of the cost of replacing cheaper machines every 3 years. I admit, a 10 year life is a stretch (but is possible for some less demanding uses), however, 5-8 years isn't unrealistic for a corporate desktop if you choose well.
Laptops generally won't have as long a useful life, 3-4 years if you choose well. 5 years is a stretch for laptops, but occasionally you might see 5 yrs or more
Remember that software can easily be 50% of the purchase cost of a computer, and the cheapest way to license most major software is via some form of OEM license, which isn't transferable to a new machine. If you can extend the useful life of the hardware, you reduce your software costs as well. That only applies up to a point because at some point you may want an upgraded version of the software. Whether it's more cost effective to purchase and install software updates, or to buy new machines with the updated software has to looked at on a case-by-case basis.
I really don't care what kind of car, stereo, phone, soft drinks, or other stuff my friends like. They have different priorities than I do, what's important to them may not be important to me.
MS is just throwing away money with this. I have no problem with that, I just need to figure out how to get them to throw some of it in my bank account.
Message from Facebook's bank - "Bing, your bank account is getting larger"
Yes, but added vertical positioning accuracy does not materially help with text rendering. It does make a slight difference, mostly for small type sizes, but it's significantly less of an advantage than increased horizontal positioning.
ClearType can't fix that problem. The issue is that ClearType is limited by the physical layout of the RGB sub-pixels in the display. LCD typically have the RGB sub-pixels as 3 vertical bars side by side (in the orientation for which the display was designed). That allows for sub-pixel rendering in one dimension (normally horizontal), but not in the other (normally vertical) dimension. Rotating the display changes the orientation of the sub-pixels, so there is nothing ClearType can do to enhance it.
The fundamental problem is that many manufacturers are trying to standardize on the 16:9 format used for HDTV. While a wide field of view is great for movies and TV, it sucks for most computer displays. I only buy 16:10 or 5:4 displays for my computer, if a laptop is only offered with 16:9, it is removed from consideration. As many comments have suggested, for most computer work, display height is more critical than display width. Yes, the wide formats work better for notebook and tablet form factors, but 16:9 is just not a good choice, stick with 16:10.
Wrong, the browser is submitting a request for a cert for xxxx\0yyyy but only verifying the cert it received is valid for xxxx.
The CA should never have issued the cert, but the browser is failing to fully validate and sanitize data received from other sources.
But you can use that land (and the enormous amount of fresh water that corn requires) to grow other food crops.
The amount of ethanol you get from corn makes corn based ethanol and the amount of resources it takes makes it a very poor replacement for gasoline, yet we're dedicating millions of acres of prime farmland and hundreds of billions of gallons of fresh water annually to growing corn solely for the production of ethanol.
If we could grow sugar cane in sufficient quantities to make large volumes of ethanol (as Brazil does), that might be viable. But that would require that the US government stop subsidizing corn based ethanol and stop penalizing cane based sugar production.
That would also likely result in a decrease in the usage of HFCS in the US to levels consistent with the rest of the world (where they don't put extra tariffs on cane based sugar), but that's rant for another time.
I've got a better idea. Stop wasting farmland and fresh water growing crops to make ethanol. Use those for growing food.
If you want to grow stuff for ethanol, use saltwater and/or aquaculture. There's plenty of saltwater, plenty of space, and it's resources that aren't already in high demand.
Slashdot Mirror
Willful copyright infringement for commercial redistribution.
Would be even funnier it if were accurate. -40c = -40f, while -42c is slightly colder than -42f.
However, at those temperatures, I'm pretty sure I'd just call it f***'n cold.
Ok, let's start with the obvious. sarcasm - Since I'm in the USA, What's a Kilogram? Now on to some paranoia. The real purpose of this is so they can gradually devalue the kg as necessary. They took us off the gold standard in 1963/1964, and all the other SI units are based upon things an average person can't measure or compare, so if they eliminate the physical kg reference cylinders, then they can gradually change the "standard" at will and we'll all get lighter (or heavier) and an ounce of gold won't be the same. /sarcasm
Of course, as someone who (deludes himself into thinking he) knows something about science, I'm completely in favor of defining a kg upon something that won't vary (even a trivial amount) over time. As such, this is a good plan.
As a bonus, it frees up 36kg of platinum and 4kg of iridium, both of which are in short supply. Which brings up one final question, how much can the US get by selling 1.8kg of platinum and .2kg of iridium?
All that money, and we still have no intelligence in the US government.
Tell them to try Chrome. Users don't need any special permission to install it into their own profile. Of course, their IT Dept could push out an administrative install, which would be a lot smarter on their part, but user's can install Chrome without any special access.
Correct. The lesson to be learned is this: "don't design software or business processes around a single vendor/product solution." When you have a good software architect, you can take advantage of vendor specific advantages and technologies without getting tied to a specific vendor/product/version.
Here's an example of getting benefit from a single vendor's advantages without tying yourself to that vendor: Starting in 1989, I designed and wrote a high performance, multi-user app, part of which was an OLTP system that ran 24/7 for 19+ years. I designed and implemented it as a DOS app on a Novell Netware 3.x network, but there was nothing about the design or implementation that required Netware. Over the years, we tested it with various Windows servers and Linux running Samba, and it worked there also. We kept it on Netware for the entire time because it was significantly faster than on a Windows network with Linux/Samba performance in-between those two, and because the Netware server was very stable. We were never locked in to Netware, but we did get to take advantage of the performance and stability benefits. We did upgrade to Netware 4.2, and most user workstations were upgraded to Win 3.11, Win95, WinNT4, Win2k, or WinXP over the years. Some of the user interaction portions were replaced with Windows apps to provide more flexibility, but they were also independent of the network/server. And, we had the benefits of Novell's NDS for years before (and after) MS created AD
MS made several errors with IE6: making it non-standard, integrating it into the OS, and encouraging people to write apps for it using ActiveX. All of which were intended to lock the customer into Windows. If it weren't for trying to integrate it into the OS, MS could simply let enterprises install it on a newer version of Windows. They would still have the slow IE6 engine with all it's security issues, but for an in-house app, that's manageable. Instead, they're trapped on XP until they rewrite/replace those IE6 specific apps, so MS has to continue to support XP and IE6, while the enterprises are not upgrading to Win7. Poor choices, bad design. All due a few completely predictable and preventable failures of software design by both MS and the enterprises who created critical processes tied to IE6 and ActiveX.
I agree. And, I've never spent $700 on an office chair. The chair I sit in as I type this is a fully (8-way) adjustable office chair. It's sturdy and comfortable. Normally $250 at Office Depot, I paid $100 (brand new) on clearance. I've worked at companies who spent $500--$700 per chair for office chairs, they weren't any more comfortable, adjustable, or durable than this one. At least 10% of the pneumatic height adjusters were broken within 5 years, along with a smaller portion of other adjustments. Mine is leather, the $500+ ones were fabric. As someone else suggested, have the students in wood and metal shop making and/or repairing the chairs and desks, it would be a valuable learning experience and would save some money.
No one needs a $700 office chair, certainly not school children who will abuse it. Not to mention how much time would be lost simply playing with adjustments on any type of adjustable chair. Keep it simple, durable, and cheap. Give them tables that are tall enough to allow standing, and chairs/stools to match that table height.
Spend the money on competent teachers. Spend money on people who actually teach, not just deliver information. People who make the subject interesting and relevant to the students. People who encourage the students to learn and explore the topic. People who are more interested in inquiring into a topic and getting students to think than they are in making sure students memorize a bunch of stuff that they can google anytime the need it in the real world.
Even spend some money on equipment and multi-media teaching tools. Multi-media makes it more interesting and enhances learning and retention. Show Mythbusters on occasion in science classes, and then have the kids test some myths they can safely test. Entertain people while they're learning, they'll remember more and want to learn more. I learned more and remember more about the US Civil war from a 2-3 hour program on the History Channel than I did in all the classroom and book time I spent on it in school (and that was a lot more than 3 hours).
Make classes interesting, and students will want to be in class and learn. Scores, literacy, and graduation rates will go up. $700 chairs will only drain the budget for things that will actually make a difference.
You would think with all of their acquisitions, Oracle would have managed to buy a clue, even if by accident.
Many of these are DOS/Windows specific, but some are BIOS or hardware limitations.
First, there was the 32MiB limitation. Actually, I think there was a 16MiB limit with FAT12, even though it theoretically supported 32 MiB
Next, they allowed up to 4 partitions, so it was 32MiB/volume, 128MiB per drive.
Next, the extended partition, allowing more than 4 volumes.
Next, up to 2GiB per volume, where we remained for a while.
Next, the CHS addressing system limited you to 8GiB, less on some systems
Next, FAT32 allowed up to 32GiB per volume, then 64GiB, then 2TiB.
Next, NTFS allowed up to 16EiB (theoretical), but NT4 wouldn't let you create a boot volume > 4GiB.
Next, the 128GiB/137GB 28-bit LBA limit.
Next, 48-bit LBA allows up to (theoretical) 128TiB (512 byte sectors), or 1PiB (4k sectors)
However, the BIOS and MBR limits you to 2TiB.
EFI has been available and shipping for at least 4 years, but most manufacturers have ignored it. Anyone having fun yet?
I'd rather watch another insipid reality TV show than listen to a Ballmer speech or interview.
Seriously Steve, hire someone to do all the speeches and interviews, it's the first of several things you could do to make MS interesting again."
Or, /. could make "plain old text" the default (or at least make it the default when no html tags are detected).
Any organization small enough to have trouble funding and domain controller Doesn't need one.
He said nothing about it being small. Apparently you missed the part about it being a "volunteer" organization. Anyone who ever worked with non-profit or volunteer organizations understands that size and budget are two completely different things.
Reading, it's not just for breakfast anymore.
Paragraphs are your friends.
I agree. Of course that would be a lot easier if /. didn't automatically rewrap your text without forcing you to manually enter paragraph tags.
I think the answer might just be to try renegotiating your price or specs.
That is the right idea. Since you (the original poster) apparently know hardware pretty well, spend your time researching and recommending the best Dell machine and configuration. Choose a machine with the right chipset, memory capacity (e.g. how many free memory slots will you have in your standard config), CPU, video, hard disk, and I/O slot/ports, and you'll have a machine that will likely be useful for 4-8 years. You may even find that you can reduce the cost to $900 or even $800 by choosing the configuration that is appropriate for your current and expected work load. If a $1000 machine lasts 5-10 years (and I've done that successfully at a number of clients), it's very cost effective for the client, and it beats the heck out of the cost of replacing cheaper machines every 3 years. I admit, a 10 year life is a stretch (but is possible for some less demanding uses), however, 5-8 years isn't unrealistic for a corporate desktop if you choose well.
Laptops generally won't have as long a useful life, 3-4 years if you choose well. 5 years is a stretch for laptops, but occasionally you might see 5 yrs or more
Remember that software can easily be 50% of the purchase cost of a computer, and the cheapest way to license most major software is via some form of OEM license, which isn't transferable to a new machine. If you can extend the useful life of the hardware, you reduce your software costs as well. That only applies up to a point because at some point you may want an upgraded version of the software. Whether it's more cost effective to purchase and install software updates, or to buy new machines with the updated software has to looked at on a case-by-case basis.
I really don't care what kind of car, stereo, phone, soft drinks, or other stuff my friends like. They have different priorities than I do, what's important to them may not be important to me.
MS is just throwing away money with this. I have no problem with that, I just need to figure out how to get them to throw some of it in my bank account.
Message from Facebook's bank - "Bing, your bank account is getting larger"
Just use CAPTCHAs for any banned words, phrases, or other banned content.
Yes, but added vertical positioning accuracy does not materially help with text rendering. It does make a slight difference, mostly for small type sizes, but it's significantly less of an advantage than increased horizontal positioning.
ClearType can't fix that problem. The issue is that ClearType is limited by the physical layout of the RGB sub-pixels in the display. LCD typically have the RGB sub-pixels as 3 vertical bars side by side (in the orientation for which the display was designed). That allows for sub-pixel rendering in one dimension (normally horizontal), but not in the other (normally vertical) dimension. Rotating the display changes the orientation of the sub-pixels, so there is nothing ClearType can do to enhance it.
The fundamental problem is that many manufacturers are trying to standardize on the 16:9 format used for HDTV. While a wide field of view is great for movies and TV, it sucks for most computer displays. I only buy 16:10 or 5:4 displays for my computer, if a laptop is only offered with 16:9, it is removed from consideration. As many comments have suggested, for most computer work, display height is more critical than display width. Yes, the wide formats work better for notebook and tablet form factors, but 16:9 is just not a good choice, stick with 16:10.
This isn't really a browser issue.
Wrong, the browser is submitting a request for a cert for xxxx\0yyyy but only verifying the cert it received is valid for xxxx. The CA should never have issued the cert, but the browser is failing to fully validate and sanitize data received from other sources.
Are you actually suggesting we're more secure if white-hats aren't constantly checking for vulnerabilities? Security by obscurity is not secure.
You don't eat dent corn, cows do.
But you can use that land (and the enormous amount of fresh water that corn requires) to grow other food crops.
The amount of ethanol you get from corn makes corn based ethanol and the amount of resources it takes makes it a very poor replacement for gasoline, yet we're dedicating millions of acres of prime farmland and hundreds of billions of gallons of fresh water annually to growing corn solely for the production of ethanol.
If we could grow sugar cane in sufficient quantities to make large volumes of ethanol (as Brazil does), that might be viable. But that would require that the US government stop subsidizing corn based ethanol and stop penalizing cane based sugar production.
That would also likely result in a decrease in the usage of HFCS in the US to levels consistent with the rest of the world (where they don't put extra tariffs on cane based sugar), but that's rant for another time.
I've got a better idea. Stop wasting farmland and fresh water growing crops to make ethanol. Use those for growing food. If you want to grow stuff for ethanol, use saltwater and/or aquaculture. There's plenty of saltwater, plenty of space, and it's resources that aren't already in high demand.