I attended an IT conference last year where Choruss was discussed. Given the regard we/.ers have for the technically-minded, I was surprised at the attitudes other college's IT directors had towards this system.
The main complaints they had about music piracy were having to deal with RIAA notices and bandwidth sucked up by P2P. My own campus is fairly enlightened - not-too-terrible packet shaping and a per-MAC address bandwidth cap. Each student gets 1 Mb/s and any relevant RIAA bitch notes.
Other campuses managed to do little better than wet themselves every time they got an RIAA letter and hadn't heard of any network management. Some didn't know how to implement any kind of QoS or packet shaping and saw all their bandwidth disappear into a black hole no matter how fat their pipe was.
These schools saw Choruss as a wonderful idea. It will end the RIAA notices, and no one will P2P ever again! Additionally, students would love them - for only yet another mandatory fee tacked onto their tuition, they can download all the music they want!
It was attractive because it made their lawyers happy and promised to mask the gross incompetence of their IT departments.
It is not a good deal for students. Those who don't listen or purchase RIAA music will still have the mandatory Choruss fee on their tuition. Those who do listen to such music also get no benefit. If they pirate all their music, having to pay extra for what they get for free provides no value. If they pay for all their music, there's no need for Choruss.
I'm paraphrasing from a low-WIS memory, but "Intelligence" measures booksmarts and scholarly knowledge. "Wisdom" measures streetsmarts and insight.
Think high INT but low WIS is absent-minded professor. Low INT but high WIS could be someone with little formal education but a deep understanding of things around them.
It's because of stuff like this that I learned to like the new Office 2007 ribbon.
I've been a pretty "advanced" user of Word since Windows 3.11 was cool, but 2007 blew me away with features. "Wow, it can do MLA references and source tracking! Wow, it can do footnotes! Wow, it can do xyz!"
Except that all of the "new" features I discovered in 2007 were also in 2003, and some of them were evidently in 6 - I just never knew they were there. Having a tabbed toolbar exposed features my primitive reptile brain never found in the litany of 2003 menus and toolbars.
Well, he had a point... it is hard to do yourself. Do you have a vanilla Vista install disc with a valid OEM license code for it? No? Okay, then have fun removing the crapware manually...;)
Actually, that's one of the nice things about Vista. If you do have a vanilla Vista disc, it can reinstall every other version of Vista. For example, you can pop in a (boxed copy) Home Premium DVD, type in a Vista Business OEM key, and it will install the right version.
Sometimes you'll have to phone Microsoft's (automated) system to activate it afterwards, but that's the only hiccup. There are even tools out there to back up an OEM pre-activation, rendering the phone call unnecessary.
the fact remains that *regardless* of how of an aircrew "prioritizes" it, it is strictly against procedures to be doing this, and a termination offense.
I agree, except that you're reading an entirely different meaning behind the word "prioritize" than what the OP probably intended.
To "prioritize" flying above learning the software means not screwing around on a laptop. Doing anything else in the cockpit means prioritizing something else above flying.
They "prioritized" learning the software above flying the plane. Not meaning that they misscheduled their attention during multitasking, but that they were multitasking to begin with.
Read again, Anon. "You prioritize it where it belongs - below aviating, navigating and communicating." (emphasis mine.)
"These guys made everyone else look bad" because they prioritized it above all those things and decided to figure out their schedule mid-flight. OP was not implying it was only bad "because they got caught."
The "no clear migration path" has always confuzzled me. Enterprise customers aren't going to go to every computer, pop in the DVD, and click the "upgrade" button - they're going to build a new Windows 7 image and deploy it.
(I wish we would migrate to Vista or 7 just because the image tools are sooo much nicer. That alone may be a compelling reason for the business folks.)
How many home users upgrade their own operating system? The disabled "upgrade" button is a feature because Windows "upgrade" installs have always been disasters. Put your pictures on a DVD and do a clean install.
Ta da. New migration path is the same as it's always been:
yes, because roads, schools, and police aren't beneficial at all. grow up.
Hmmmm? Why is "OMG ROADS" the grown-up response to "Government in general does a lot of terrible, wasteful things?"
At the Federal level, very little goes to roads, schools, and police. At the local level (at least where I live) those are the first things cut because cutting them scares up support for new taxes.
So, yes, roads, schools, and police are beneficial. Nobody said that they weren't, and that doesn't explain how anything coming out of California makes a lick of sense.
Econ nitpick: SUPPLY of bandwidth is restricted because, as you say, margins are higher and expanding infrastructure costs money.
Quantity of bandwidth demanded would be higher at a lower price point, but demand for bandwidth is the same in both cases.
Because supply of bandwidth is constricted, costlier gear is needed for packet shaping, QoS and the like. This is another misallocation of resources - wasting silicon on expensive products to manage scarce bandwidth rather than simply adding more bandwidth.
Potentially! You also need to be in the same room, facing the same wall, so something silly like a different background doesn't prevent you from logging in.
After formatting the laptop, I did not reinstall that software.
Asus ships the software you're describing with laptops they sell; it came on mine. It takes a bunch of snapshots of your face through the webcam (you're supposed to rotate your head) and then if it sees your face at the login screen, it logs you in.
As some other posters said, day traders "benefit society" by providing liquidity. If we didn't have anyone to buy when we wanted to sell nor anyone to sell when we wanted to buy, we wouldn't have financial markets. Doesn't matter if they're tweaking out over a computer and paying ridiculous commissions and capital gains taxes or not.
Day trading doesn't necessarily hurt anyone either. Buying a share at $5 and immediately reselling it at $6 doesn't mean you ripped off the guy you bought it from; for example, maybe he bought it at $4.
Now, if you can find a way to consistently make money day trading, bully for you.
Opening a directory with 50 video files may slow the Explorer window to generate thumbnails... but only the first time you open that window. It doesn't regenerate them every time, so it won't take any longer to open that window the second time through.
If the Quickload installer won't launch, try the right-click-run-as-administrator trick. Or go to its properties and turn on compatibility mode for XP SP2. Or usually if an installer fails, Vista will pop up a more-or-less helpful window offering to try "with recommended settings."
For what it's worth, I checked out their website. They'll send your friend a Vista-compatible disc for $15 S&H. I suppose that's what you get when you're still targeting Windows 98 as a supported operating system!
Another thing to consider: Your friends' preinstalled copy of Vista is going to be garbage because of all the broken sometimes unremovable shovelware. Ditto for the restore image on the recovery partition or the CDs, and doubly so if it's a laptop. All the computers I see (laptops especially) are practically unusable, even fresh after a recovery partition. Install from a regular boxed-copy Vista disc, type in the OEM key (you'll have to back up your activation or give Microsoft's automated line a call) and the same laptop will fly.
Anecdote: Never in HIGH SCHOOL. My high school "literature" classes gave homework assignments involving poster board and markers. Some overachievers used glitter.
In college, that is exactly what every literature class was about, in English and Spanish, although OP was being sarcastic about his "John walks across the street" example. Lots of essay questions on "how is xyz a symbol of foo and bar." Or better yet, "What does the author really mean?" with an implicit "according to my nutjob worldview" attached at the end.
Some parts were useful - learning some technical language lets me argue about movies better, for example - but look up some literature stuff on Google Scholar, or even the "literature-y" parts of Wikipedia. It's abysmal. Depressing. Awful.
Although you could write a whole book about "Who is John Galt?" ^_^
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It's a deal for the students who want to pay because their purchases are subsidized by the other students.
Tuition is expensive enough; it'll be a cold day in Redmond before I pay for a pirate's iTunes subscription.
I attended an IT conference last year where Choruss was discussed. Given the regard we /.ers have for the technically-minded, I was surprised at the attitudes other college's IT directors had towards this system.
The main complaints they had about music piracy were having to deal with RIAA notices and bandwidth sucked up by P2P. My own campus is fairly enlightened - not-too-terrible packet shaping and a per-MAC address bandwidth cap. Each student gets 1 Mb/s and any relevant RIAA bitch notes.
Other campuses managed to do little better than wet themselves every time they got an RIAA letter and hadn't heard of any network management. Some didn't know how to implement any kind of QoS or packet shaping and saw all their bandwidth disappear into a black hole no matter how fat their pipe was.
These schools saw Choruss as a wonderful idea. It will end the RIAA notices, and no one will P2P ever again! Additionally, students would love them - for only yet another mandatory fee tacked onto their tuition, they can download all the music they want!
It was attractive because it made their lawyers happy and promised to mask the gross incompetence of their IT departments.
It is not a good deal for students. Those who don't listen or purchase RIAA music will still have the mandatory Choruss fee on their tuition. Those who do listen to such music also get no benefit. If they pirate all their music, having to pay extra for what they get for free provides no value. If they pay for all their music, there's no need for Choruss.
I'm paraphrasing from a low-WIS memory, but "Intelligence" measures booksmarts and scholarly knowledge. "Wisdom" measures streetsmarts and insight.
Think high INT but low WIS is absent-minded professor. Low INT but high WIS could be someone with little formal education but a deep understanding of things around them.
It's because of stuff like this that I learned to like the new Office 2007 ribbon.
I've been a pretty "advanced" user of Word since Windows 3.11 was cool, but 2007 blew me away with features. "Wow, it can do MLA references and source tracking! Wow, it can do footnotes! Wow, it can do xyz!"
Except that all of the "new" features I discovered in 2007 were also in 2003, and some of them were evidently in 6 - I just never knew they were there. Having a tabbed toolbar exposed features my primitive reptile brain never found in the litany of 2003 menus and toolbars.
Now, mod me offtopic!
Why would you call Windows 7 "Vista Remarketed" but run Server 2008?
The latter is Vista.
It's called Activation Backup and Restore (ABR). Link is here.
Run it once, it backs up your activation to an XML file. Save it somewhere and reinstall Windows. Run ABR again to restore the activation.
Wow - Google confirms the budget? I didn't even know they were *in* the Constitution!
Yes; the Founding Fathers demonstrated incredible foresight in their construction of our Constitution.
I'm afraid you're mistaken. Congress writes a budget, the President approves or vetoes it.
Google confirms it - "Who writes the Federal budget?" is a good query.
Well, he had a point... it is hard to do yourself. Do you have a vanilla Vista install disc with a valid OEM license code for it? No? Okay, then have fun removing the crapware manually... ;)
Actually, that's one of the nice things about Vista. If you do have a vanilla Vista disc, it can reinstall every other version of Vista. For example, you can pop in a (boxed copy) Home Premium DVD, type in a Vista Business OEM key, and it will install the right version.
Sometimes you'll have to phone Microsoft's (automated) system to activate it afterwards, but that's the only hiccup. There are even tools out there to back up an OEM pre-activation, rendering the phone call unnecessary.
the fact remains that *regardless* of how of an aircrew "prioritizes" it, it is strictly against procedures to be doing this, and a termination offense.
I agree, except that you're reading an entirely different meaning behind the word "prioritize" than what the OP probably intended.
To "prioritize" flying above learning the software means not screwing around on a laptop. Doing anything else in the cockpit means prioritizing something else above flying.
They "prioritized" learning the software above flying the plane. Not meaning that they misscheduled their attention during multitasking, but that they were multitasking to begin with.
Read again, Anon. "You prioritize it where it belongs - below aviating, navigating and communicating." (emphasis mine.)
"These guys made everyone else look bad" because they prioritized it above all those things and decided to figure out their schedule mid-flight. OP was not implying it was only bad "because they got caught."
A trillion bytes is a terabyte? You best be trollin', summary.
Scarily is the correct adverb - "it's scarily similar" - although "frighteningly" might be more common.
You could also hear "it's scary similar," although that's slang.
What channel is Hulu on? v.v
The "no clear migration path" has always confuzzled me. Enterprise customers aren't going to go to every computer, pop in the DVD, and click the "upgrade" button - they're going to build a new Windows 7 image and deploy it.
(I wish we would migrate to Vista or 7 just because the image tools are sooo much nicer. That alone may be a compelling reason for the business folks.)
How many home users upgrade their own operating system? The disabled "upgrade" button is a feature because Windows "upgrade" installs have always been disasters. Put your pictures on a DVD and do a clean install.
Ta da. New migration path is the same as it's always been:
Probably right. Lately though, describing the benefits of government is like describing the benefits of irritable bowel syndrome.
yes, because roads, schools, and police aren't beneficial at all. grow up.
Hmmmm? Why is "OMG ROADS" the grown-up response to "Government in general does a lot of terrible, wasteful things?"
At the Federal level, very little goes to roads, schools, and police. At the local level (at least where I live) those are the first things cut because cutting them scares up support for new taxes.
So, yes, roads, schools, and police are beneficial. Nobody said that they weren't, and that doesn't explain how anything coming out of California makes a lick of sense.
Zilog's Z80 is still VERY relevant. I learned Z80 assembler to properly program my TI-83 and TI-84 calculators. The TI-89 and up use the Motorola 68k.
Econ nitpick: SUPPLY of bandwidth is restricted because, as you say, margins are higher and expanding infrastructure costs money.
Quantity of bandwidth demanded would be higher at a lower price point, but demand for bandwidth is the same in both cases.
Because supply of bandwidth is constricted, costlier gear is needed for packet shaping, QoS and the like. This is another misallocation of resources - wasting silicon on expensive products to manage scarce bandwidth rather than simply adding more bandwidth.
I agree with the other 99% of your analysis.
Potentially! You also need to be in the same room, facing the same wall, so something silly like a different background doesn't prevent you from logging in.
After formatting the laptop, I did not reinstall that software.
Asus ships the software you're describing with laptops they sell; it came on mine. It takes a bunch of snapshots of your face through the webcam (you're supposed to rotate your head) and then if it sees your face at the login screen, it logs you in.
They call it "SmartLogon."
As some other posters said, day traders "benefit society" by providing liquidity. If we didn't have anyone to buy when we wanted to sell nor anyone to sell when we wanted to buy, we wouldn't have financial markets. Doesn't matter if they're tweaking out over a computer and paying ridiculous commissions and capital gains taxes or not.
Day trading doesn't necessarily hurt anyone either. Buying a share at $5 and immediately reselling it at $6 doesn't mean you ripped off the guy you bought it from; for example, maybe he bought it at $4.
Now, if you can find a way to consistently make money day trading, bully for you.
For a while, Blizzard had little keygen token thingies that would generate a 1-time password for you to log in to your World of Warcraft account.
I wonder if these will cease to function after the migration to Battle.net accounts.
Opening a directory with 50 video files may slow the Explorer window to generate thumbnails... but only the first time you open that window. It doesn't regenerate them every time, so it won't take any longer to open that window the second time through.
If the Quickload installer won't launch, try the right-click-run-as-administrator trick. Or go to its properties and turn on compatibility mode for XP SP2. Or usually if an installer fails, Vista will pop up a more-or-less helpful window offering to try "with recommended settings."
For what it's worth, I checked out their website. They'll send your friend a Vista-compatible disc for $15 S&H. I suppose that's what you get when you're still targeting Windows 98 as a supported operating system!
Another thing to consider: Your friends' preinstalled copy of Vista is going to be garbage because of all the broken sometimes unremovable shovelware. Ditto for the restore image on the recovery partition or the CDs, and doubly so if it's a laptop. All the computers I see (laptops especially) are practically unusable, even fresh after a recovery partition. Install from a regular boxed-copy Vista disc, type in the OEM key (you'll have to back up your activation or give Microsoft's automated line a call) and the same laptop will fly.
Has that ever really happened? Ever?
Anecdote: Never in HIGH SCHOOL. My high school "literature" classes gave homework assignments involving poster board and markers. Some overachievers used glitter.
In college, that is exactly what every literature class was about, in English and Spanish, although OP was being sarcastic about his "John walks across the street" example. Lots of essay questions on "how is xyz a symbol of foo and bar." Or better yet, "What does the author really mean?" with an implicit "according to my nutjob worldview" attached at the end.
Some parts were useful - learning some technical language lets me argue about movies better, for example - but look up some literature stuff on Google Scholar, or even the "literature-y" parts of Wikipedia. It's abysmal. Depressing. Awful.
Although you could write a whole book about "Who is John Galt?" ^_^