I believe Windows Update will recommend more "compatible" drivers than the ones you currently have. That could mean for your specific product (Linksys Wireless G WUSB54G v4) versus generic chipset drivers (RALINK whatever), or it could mean "newer," or it could mean a number of other tricky things.
But, only if the drivers are in its database. It will regularly push old nVidia drivers, for example, even if you have newer ones installed. It will push hard disk and RAID controller drivers, with disastrous results. I do laptop repair at a college I attend, and Windows Update pushed a driver update that blue-screened the machine on boot. Even in safe mode. Even in VGA mode. On an XP machine, no less.
But, it can be smart, too. It always seems to recommend newer printer drivers, even if the printer isn't installed at the time. If a device is reporting an error (or even if you disable your network card!), it'll push a driver in an attempt to solve your problem.
In my limited experience on this planet, I've found it wise to avoid installing disk controller drivers of all stripes (no pun intended) and video driver updates from Windows Update. Ditto for most drivers - get newer versions directly from creative or realtek or intel or whoever. At Microsoft's best, the results are the same - more commonly, you get an old driver, or a blue-screen on boot.
As opposed to the expensive ones who have done the same?
Well, as I said, "paying $bucks doesn't guarantee you a good one, either." Boards have always been looking at pay-for-performance, but getting the "pay" part down better than the "performance" part.
But, if you pay dirt, you will get a bad CEO. If you overpay, you may get a bad CEO. The solution is high turnover, which is why boards are eager to get rid of "golden parachute" packages, especially with how the bailout bill was worded.
If this is true, why don't the CEO's set the trend by taking less?
Because CEOs are important. No board of directors wants to skimp on the CEO offerings, let they get a "cheap" one that runs their company in the ground.
But, there have to be some limits. While paying $dirt means you won't get a good CEO (even for large values of $dirt), paying $bucks doesn't guarantee you a good one, either. The idea is to pay CEOs for their performance, just like any other employee.
Problem is, how do you measure a CEOs performance? If a company has a great year, was it just because of a good economy? Would that year have been just as great if the CEO did nothing? How about if the company has a bad year? Is it the CEO's fault if oil prices quadruple and the financial markets tank? Do you just measure "attendance" and say "thanks for showing up - here's a check?"
Boards are getting better at this. CEO turnover is high, and the anti-"golden parachute" clause in the bailout bill has encouraged a lot of boards to axe those clauses. Even if they aren't subject to conditions of that bailout, they want to be seen as proactive so as to avoid more government intervention.
You don't know of places that enforce the use of French in Canada? Is that a joke, or do you not consider Quebec to be part of Canada?
The parent said: but I am unaware of people who... enforce the use of French in parts of Canada, being vilified like the people who push hard for English in America.
He knows they exist - but he's wondering why they're not "vilified" the same way Americans wanting people to speak English are.
A good question! And you two seem to agree - if Spaniards demand you learn Spanish in Spain, why do we also have to learn Spanish at home?
Simply put, many artists see a choice between giving in to the RIAA or languishing in obscurity forever
To play devil's advocate, it seems the RIAA is providing a legitimate service then, doesn't it? Sign here and you will no longer languish in obscurity.
If this new artists coalition thingy can provide the same services, all the power to them. The industry needs competition, and if they can offer a better deal on the sign here to not languish part of the business, it's better for everyone.
If it can only refresh every few minutes, it'd be perfect for airing CSPAN, right? I mean, it's not like Congress moves very fast - you really don't need a refresh rate measured in Hz.
And if they got it in 3D... It'd be just like you're there!
It's not a "right-wingers blaming minorities" kind of thing. The Community Reinvestment Act was passed to force banks to make loans to "underserved populations" - i.e., people who have no shot of ever paying back a loan.
Banks are more than happy to make loans. It's how they make money. In a perfect world, banks would make as many loans as they possibly could, because we all know that they're evil money-grubbing plutocrats, and making loans makes money.
But, the "making money" part only happens if the loan is paid back. So, whether or not you can pay back the loan is naturally a major concern for a bank - would you loan $100 to a friend if you knew he would never pay you back? If he already owes five other friends money? Yet banks are required to give $300,000 to perfect strangers on a daily basis.
Refusing to give a stranger $300,000 because you don't think you'll ever see them again is usually a wise decision. Unless they're a member of a minority group. Then, it's most likely "racism" and a grand opportunity for politics at the expense of a group of monocle-clad stereotypes nobody likes anyway.
The CRA practically created the subprime market - banks were compelled by law to make loans to borrowers who couldn't even afford down payments. The original intent of the law (avoiding the more cynical reasons of race-baiting politics) was to help develop "distressed" and "inner-city" areas, but it created a new problem: You can't refuse to make an equally bad loan to someone because he's not "inner-city" enough. Once banks were forced to hand out subprime loans, they had to give them to everybody.
Banks are given "report cards" based on how many of these loans they've made. Refusing to make them, especially for a reason as silly as "they can't pay you back", gets you a "substantial noncompliance" rating. Good luck ever opening a new branch, offering new services, merging, or doing anything else requiring regulatory approval.
Of course, one bad piece of regulation isn't the sole cause for the entire housing bubble. But, if you have to start pointing fingers at those evil, racist conservatives, Greenspan would be a better scapegoat.
The other problem is that games can easily take upwards of 4 years to develop. (Studios have been seeking venture capital to start writing a game, for cryin' out loud.)
But... do you want your game to have 4-year-old graphics? To look dated before it's even released?
There's not really a good solution to that. People I've talked to (many years ago) and the internets say that you can A) design your game to kick the shit out of everything available today, because that will be "midrange" by the time your game is actually released and B) try to push the graphics engine and art assets as far down the development line as possible. Get basic stuff together, make your levels and your story, and at the very end use all of the shiny technology available at once!
Not sure how things have changed, or if any of those actually work. Maybe someone living the dream can chime in.
Open your favorite C or C++ compiler. Write the following function:
void blowthestack(int i) {
printf("%i", ++i);
blowthestack(i);
}
Tell me what number you get to.
Stack is very, very finite. And, by the default settings in most compilers, very, very small. Visual Studio 2008's default settings made it to 4713; YMMV.
We were given a lab assignment were we were practically forced to use it - a user can draw a picture, and you have to write the code to allow you to fill in a closed (or not so closed) shape. You know, the paint bucket tool in pbrush - you click in the region is filled with a solid color.
There's a nice recursive algorithm - something like fill(x, y). Return if (x,y) is filled or a boundary color, else do fill(x+1,y), fill (x, y+1), fill(x-1, y), fill(x, y-1). Or something like that, I'd have to look at my notes, or maybe think about it for a minute or so. But, the idea is that you recursively fill outwards from where the user clicked and fill every point.
Except, that such an algorithm would blow the stack. Even a tiny region on the screen has thousands of pixels - can your compiler handle thousands of layers of function calls? The solution was to code your own stack structure for saving the state of the function, and gotos were really handy for simulating "function calls."
I use AT&T DSL (3Mbit rated) in Wisconsin, and I don't have problems with torrenting. I usually do it late at night, if that makes any difference. WoW patches have always been fast.
I had a problem with my line hanging up at random, too. So, I went back into my modem's config page and changed the IP refresh (or whatever it was called) back to something sane. (I changed it to 99999, and the modem stored it as some negative -63229 signed integer overflow aberration).
My cousin's line would also hang up - at the same time, every other day. (Not sure what DSL provider he uses, though.)
At least with my experiences, it doesn't sound like AT&T does anything creative to manage bandwidth. But, it is odd that your line kept hanging up. Did your DSL modem crash? I know that my router couldn't handle some torrents (too many seeds/leeches) until I patched the firmware.
That all the World of Warcraft players, when installing the new patch for the Lich King, will now be subject to slower download rates cuz they need a 1GB patch?
Comcast is bad, but no.
They're not talking about changing anybody's bandwidth (this time), but which packets are given priority. A router will dispatch a packet from your grandmother checking her e-mail before a packet from your WoW torrent... but you'll get the same download speeds.
It's latency, not bandwidth, as other wise people have said. As long as 6 MBits of your patch are getting through every second, you don't care how long each bit actually spent in transit. (10ms to your house? 100ms?)
Grandma surfing the web cares if it takes 10 seconds for a website comes up, as does the guy playing CounterStrike.
...As my cable modem service slows to a CRAWL if I have a torrent open for more than 20-25 minutes. Once you terminate the d/l, it stays that way for 20-25 minutes or so... The throttling is so severe that DNS requests time-out... Not really that awesome of a solution, IMO.
That's probably not throttling. Same thing happens to my cousin, and the same thing happens to me (though not as bad.) Every seed and leech in that torrent is still hammering your connection and timing out, requesting what parts you're advertising. At least that's what my firewall logs seem to suggest.
Power cycle your cable modem and get a new IP address. Your former cloud will no longer be DDoSing your connection.
Maybe there could be some kind of authenticity indicator - a special mouse cursor used only for these popups (and inaccessible everywhere else) or an animation that plays when you mouse into the window
Or you could play a dootdoot! noise, black out everything on the display, and render only a modal UAC dialog box...
I kid, but most users need to be shot. I've learned more about disinfecting viruses in the few months I've worked at the help desk at my college than the years of "working" for relatives...
At any given time, there are always 3 or 4 laptops (on a campus of roughly 6000 students) with virus infections. These get left for me, because only one other person on our staff can reliably remove them (great for my little nerd ego.)
But, these are student's laptops. You know, our generation. Our peers, who have grown up with the internet and technology, and somehow don't realize that A) clicking through to ignore every Windows Update reminder followed by B) clicking on and installing every web popup ad that promises smilies could only lead to pain.
What this requires is user training. And by "user training", I mean that the next person I find with an "XP Antivirus 2008" infection is going to eat a Super Soaker round, and I encourage everyone else to do the same. Sabot!
he sole purpose of a corporation is to serve the common good or pubic good. The first corporations granted corporate charters were the Honourable East India Company in 1600 and the Dutch East India Company in 1602.
Funny how British colonization served the common good. Wait...
Especially not true with the way I set mine up. EWF means I can download all the virus infections I want, and simply reboot to get rid of them. I don't run any anti-virus software on mine, which admittedly would probably kill its performance.
Not that Linux can't scream, but I strongly prefer Office 2007 over open office, Outlook over Thunderbird, and enjoy playing videogames a bit too much to justify an equal amount of tweaking on the Linux side. I'd dual-boot for kicks, except on the netbooks HD space is an issue.
They still want an x86 computer, so that they can still sell to people who want Windows, never mind if it chugs along slowly.
Actually, that's pretty true. I got the Acer One Note thingy mentioned in the article. It came with a Linux on training wheels kinda thing ("Linpus," they called it) that vaguely resembled an XP desktop with 4 buttons. I booted it, turned it off, and installed memory (had to remove the keyboard and the motherboard to install the memory underneath the motherboard!) and put the whole thing back together again.
Installing Windows from an external CD-ROM drive took forever, and running it was horribly slow. (I put Windows Server 2003 Standard on there; "Microsoft Dreamspark" is giving away free licenses to college students.) It would hard-lock on any disk access, and the machine would be unusable until the current transaction finished and the little green light blinked off.
The problem seems to be that Windows loves to do a bunch of little writes to disk. All the time. It'll log transactions in buffers in memory, and it won't flush them until the disk is idle, or it has a lot of writes pending, or it otherwise thinks it's a good time. Works fine on hard disks, but the 8 GB SSD in the Acer OneNote (and others, I'd assume) is NOT going to be winning any performance awards anytime soon. The read/write speeds were worse than my flash drive.
So, I installed EWF drivers on the thing. (Think the file system drivers that make Linux Live CDs work, only designed for XP embedded.) The idea is to run Windows off of a read-only volume, so EWF drivers commit file system changes to memory rather than disk. (If you want, you can later write those changes to disk all at once.) All soon as disk access was effectively read only, bam!, everything was lightning fast.
SSD companies have complained that Windows drivers are full of fail, and I suspect that they're right. But, with EWF on, the thing runs World of Warcraft, Office 2007, and Firefox 3 flawlessly. (It even played back 1080p h264 files without a hitch.) You can also do nifty things like delete all the icons on your desktop, reboot and have them still be there, which is a fun trick to show people.
So, with memory and sales tax, the entire computer cost me $430. It does everything I wanted it to do (be a big PDA and take notes in class), and even plays a few games. (World of Warcraft, I haven't gotten around to installing anything else on it. I game on my desktop, and when I do, it's usually not WoW ^.^)
Point of this long, rambling post: If you're willing to tweak things a little bit (this is/., so tweaking Windows shouldn't be a problem) you can make Windows absolutely scream on these webnotes. (Bluee screen of death notes?) Windows isn't that bloated that it won't run on an Atom.
So come on and hit me without hiding behind an anonymous troll, who thinks enviromentalists are the scum of the earth and why?
People think that way because everyone has their own definition of "environmentalist." I consider myself an environmentalist. But, others don't consider conservationists as environmentalists, or think only Greenpeace terrorists are environmentalists, or maintain any number of skewed and biased misconceptions.
The problem is that environmentalism of all stripes is largely political and has its share of hypocrisy. The Sierra club has oil wells on their nature preserves, Al Gore has a $4k/month electric bill, and everybody flies and drives. It's easy to scorn hypocrisy and disregard any of the larger ideals.
I would personally stop short at "scum of the earth," but some people who label themselves environmentalists are misguided. You say you know where food comes from - I do, too. Both of my parents, and their parents, and their parents unto the time when Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church on Sundays, were farmers.
But, food comes from a store. You'll say, "Wait, you idiot! Someone has to grow it!" But, if the store has food, somebody somewhere is growing it. If the food is inexpensive, it's an indicator that a lot of somebodies somewhere are growing it. The miracle of the modern era is that farms are more productive - less land feeds more people - and that food can be shipped almost anywhere.
The lack of green space is simply a side effect of A) existing land being used more efficiently and B) food being grown elsewhere, where it's more productive to do so. No pillaging and plundering involved, unless you count the misguided who label themselves as protectionists/intellectuals/whatever who lock the third world out of our marekts with tariffs.
C may not be the "best" language for parallel processing, but it's not like it's impossible, or difficult, or not recommended. You ARE dependent on your operating system for multitasking, but it's not like POSIX processes are that horrible, and Windows threads are actually pretty stupidly easy.
Developing an algorithm that can be parallelized (did I invent a word?) is harder. But, if you can describe something in terms of a Nondeterministic Finite Automaton, you already have something that can be made massively parallel, so win!
I'm sorry, but if a company is making it impossible for DUI prosecutions to be done fairly, the company officers should be sitting in jail whilst we wait to find out if they can get the source code together or not.
Or maybe, better yet, if a breathalyser's results can't be used in court, that company should lose a lot of business.
Having a working product (esp. one that "works" for a particular purpose) is usually a pretty strong selling point.
Actually, you can legally make a copy for a friend. This came up in the 80s with mix tapes.
Really? I know that's true in Canada (and by, "I know," I mean someone who was allegedly Canadian said so/.) but I still think would be infringing stateside.
That's entirely possible for some devices in Windows - the Windows Driver Foundation lets some drivers run in userland. In fact, "all" printer drivers run that way on Vista - the WDF runs as a service and acts as a broker of sorts between userspace and kernelspace.
For other devices, it's just not possible. Try writing a user-mode graphics driver and get back to me.
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Yes, yes; "Parlous" is a perfectly cromulent word.
(Why did Google Chrome put a red squiggly line underneath "cromulent"?!)
I believe Windows Update will recommend more "compatible" drivers than the ones you currently have. That could mean for your specific product (Linksys Wireless G WUSB54G v4) versus generic chipset drivers (RALINK whatever), or it could mean "newer," or it could mean a number of other tricky things.
But, only if the drivers are in its database. It will regularly push old nVidia drivers, for example, even if you have newer ones installed. It will push hard disk and RAID controller drivers, with disastrous results. I do laptop repair at a college I attend, and Windows Update pushed a driver update that blue-screened the machine on boot. Even in safe mode. Even in VGA mode. On an XP machine, no less.
But, it can be smart, too. It always seems to recommend newer printer drivers, even if the printer isn't installed at the time. If a device is reporting an error (or even if you disable your network card!), it'll push a driver in an attempt to solve your problem.
In my limited experience on this planet, I've found it wise to avoid installing disk controller drivers of all stripes (no pun intended) and video driver updates from Windows Update. Ditto for most drivers - get newer versions directly from creative or realtek or intel or whoever. At Microsoft's best, the results are the same - more commonly, you get an old driver, or a blue-screen on boot.
As opposed to the expensive ones who have done the same?
Well, as I said, "paying $bucks doesn't guarantee you a good one, either." Boards have always been looking at pay-for-performance, but getting the "pay" part down better than the "performance" part.
But, if you pay dirt, you will get a bad CEO. If you overpay, you may get a bad CEO. The solution is high turnover, which is why boards are eager to get rid of "golden parachute" packages, especially with how the bailout bill was worded.
If this is true, why don't the CEO's set the trend by taking less?
Because CEOs are important. No board of directors wants to skimp on the CEO offerings, let they get a "cheap" one that runs their company in the ground.
But, there have to be some limits. While paying $dirt means you won't get a good CEO (even for large values of $dirt), paying $bucks doesn't guarantee you a good one, either. The idea is to pay CEOs for their performance, just like any other employee.
Problem is, how do you measure a CEOs performance? If a company has a great year, was it just because of a good economy? Would that year have been just as great if the CEO did nothing? How about if the company has a bad year? Is it the CEO's fault if oil prices quadruple and the financial markets tank? Do you just measure "attendance" and say "thanks for showing up - here's a check?"
Boards are getting better at this. CEO turnover is high, and the anti-"golden parachute" clause in the bailout bill has encouraged a lot of boards to axe those clauses. Even if they aren't subject to conditions of that bailout, they want to be seen as proactive so as to avoid more government intervention.
You don't know of places that enforce the use of French in Canada? Is that a joke, or do you not consider Quebec to be part of Canada?
The parent said: but I am unaware of people who ... enforce the use of French in parts of Canada, being vilified like the people who push hard for English in America.
He knows they exist - but he's wondering why they're not "vilified" the same way Americans wanting people to speak English are.
A good question! And you two seem to agree - if Spaniards demand you learn Spanish in Spain, why do we also have to learn Spanish at home?
Simply put, many artists see a choice between giving in to the RIAA or languishing in obscurity forever
To play devil's advocate, it seems the RIAA is providing a legitimate service then, doesn't it? Sign here and you will no longer languish in obscurity.
If this new artists coalition thingy can provide the same services, all the power to them. The industry needs competition, and if they can offer a better deal on the sign here to not languish part of the business, it's better for everyone.
And i'ts attitudes like that that'll keep this technology from taking off!
If it can only refresh every few minutes, it'd be perfect for airing CSPAN, right? I mean, it's not like Congress moves very fast - you really don't need a refresh rate measured in Hz.
And if they got it in 3D... It'd be just like you're there!
It's not a "right-wingers blaming minorities" kind of thing. The Community Reinvestment Act was passed to force banks to make loans to "underserved populations" - i.e., people who have no shot of ever paying back a loan.
Banks are more than happy to make loans. It's how they make money. In a perfect world, banks would make as many loans as they possibly could, because we all know that they're evil money-grubbing plutocrats, and making loans makes money.
But, the "making money" part only happens if the loan is paid back. So, whether or not you can pay back the loan is naturally a major concern for a bank - would you loan $100 to a friend if you knew he would never pay you back? If he already owes five other friends money? Yet banks are required to give $300,000 to perfect strangers on a daily basis.
Refusing to give a stranger $300,000 because you don't think you'll ever see them again is usually a wise decision. Unless they're a member of a minority group. Then, it's most likely "racism" and a grand opportunity for politics at the expense of a group of monocle-clad stereotypes nobody likes anyway.
The CRA practically created the subprime market - banks were compelled by law to make loans to borrowers who couldn't even afford down payments. The original intent of the law (avoiding the more cynical reasons of race-baiting politics) was to help develop "distressed" and "inner-city" areas, but it created a new problem: You can't refuse to make an equally bad loan to someone because he's not "inner-city" enough. Once banks were forced to hand out subprime loans, they had to give them to everybody.
Banks are given "report cards" based on how many of these loans they've made. Refusing to make them, especially for a reason as silly as "they can't pay you back", gets you a "substantial noncompliance" rating. Good luck ever opening a new branch, offering new services, merging, or doing anything else requiring regulatory approval.
Of course, one bad piece of regulation isn't the sole cause for the entire housing bubble. But, if you have to start pointing fingers at those evil, racist conservatives, Greenspan would be a better scapegoat.
The other problem is that games can easily take upwards of 4 years to develop. (Studios have been seeking venture capital to start writing a game, for cryin' out loud.)
But... do you want your game to have 4-year-old graphics? To look dated before it's even released?
There's not really a good solution to that. People I've talked to (many years ago) and the internets say that you can A) design your game to kick the shit out of everything available today, because that will be "midrange" by the time your game is actually released and B) try to push the graphics engine and art assets as far down the development line as possible. Get basic stuff together, make your levels and your story, and at the very end use all of the shiny technology available at once!
Not sure how things have changed, or if any of those actually work. Maybe someone living the dream can chime in.
That's a troll, right?
You're fucking kidding, right?
Open your favorite C or C++ compiler. Write the following function:
void blowthestack(int i) {
printf("%i", ++i);
blowthestack(i);
}
Tell me what number you get to.
Stack is very, very finite. And, by the default settings in most compilers, very, very small. Visual Studio 2008's default settings made it to 4713; YMMV.
Goto actually is good, for some cases.
We were given a lab assignment were we were practically forced to use it - a user can draw a picture, and you have to write the code to allow you to fill in a closed (or not so closed) shape. You know, the paint bucket tool in pbrush - you click in the region is filled with a solid color.
There's a nice recursive algorithm - something like fill(x, y). Return if (x,y) is filled or a boundary color, else do fill(x+1,y), fill (x, y+1), fill(x-1, y), fill(x, y-1). Or something like that, I'd have to look at my notes, or maybe think about it for a minute or so. But, the idea is that you recursively fill outwards from where the user clicked and fill every point.
Except, that such an algorithm would blow the stack. Even a tiny region on the screen has thousands of pixels - can your compiler handle thousands of layers of function calls? The solution was to code your own stack structure for saving the state of the function, and gotos were really handy for simulating "function calls."
Interesting...
I use AT&T DSL (3Mbit rated) in Wisconsin, and I don't have problems with torrenting. I usually do it late at night, if that makes any difference. WoW patches have always been fast.
I had a problem with my line hanging up at random, too. So, I went back into my modem's config page and changed the IP refresh (or whatever it was called) back to something sane. (I changed it to 99999, and the modem stored it as some negative -63229 signed integer overflow aberration).
My cousin's line would also hang up - at the same time, every other day. (Not sure what DSL provider he uses, though.)
At least with my experiences, it doesn't sound like AT&T does anything creative to manage bandwidth. But, it is odd that your line kept hanging up. Did your DSL modem crash? I know that my router couldn't handle some torrents (too many seeds/leeches) until I patched the firmware.
That all the World of Warcraft players, when installing the new patch for the Lich King, will now be subject to slower download rates cuz they need a 1GB patch?
Comcast is bad, but no.
They're not talking about changing anybody's bandwidth (this time), but which packets are given priority. A router will dispatch a packet from your grandmother checking her e-mail before a packet from your WoW torrent... but you'll get the same download speeds.
It's latency, not bandwidth, as other wise people have said. As long as 6 MBits of your patch are getting through every second, you don't care how long each bit actually spent in transit. (10ms to your house? 100ms?)
Grandma surfing the web cares if it takes 10 seconds for a website comes up, as does the guy playing CounterStrike.
That's probably not throttling. Same thing happens to my cousin, and the same thing happens to me (though not as bad.) Every seed and leech in that torrent is still hammering your connection and timing out, requesting what parts you're advertising. At least that's what my firewall logs seem to suggest.
Power cycle your cable modem and get a new IP address. Your former cloud will no longer be DDoSing your connection.
Maybe there could be some kind of authenticity indicator - a special mouse cursor used only for these popups (and inaccessible everywhere else) or an animation that plays when you mouse into the window
Or you could play a dootdoot! noise, black out everything on the display, and render only a modal UAC dialog box...
I kid, but most users need to be shot. I've learned more about disinfecting viruses in the few months I've worked at the help desk at my college than the years of "working" for relatives...
At any given time, there are always 3 or 4 laptops (on a campus of roughly 6000 students) with virus infections. These get left for me, because only one other person on our staff can reliably remove them (great for my little nerd ego.)
But, these are student's laptops. You know, our generation. Our peers, who have grown up with the internet and technology, and somehow don't realize that A) clicking through to ignore every Windows Update reminder followed by B) clicking on and installing every web popup ad that promises smilies could only lead to pain.
What this requires is user training. And by "user training", I mean that the next person I find with an "XP Antivirus 2008" infection is going to eat a Super Soaker round, and I encourage everyone else to do the same. Sabot!
he sole purpose of a corporation is to serve the common good or pubic good. The first corporations granted corporate charters were the Honourable East India Company in 1600 and the Dutch East India Company in 1602.
Funny how British colonization served the common good. Wait...
Especially not true with the way I set mine up. EWF means I can download all the virus infections I want, and simply reboot to get rid of them. I don't run any anti-virus software on mine, which admittedly would probably kill its performance.
Not that Linux can't scream, but I strongly prefer Office 2007 over open office, Outlook over Thunderbird, and enjoy playing videogames a bit too much to justify an equal amount of tweaking on the Linux side. I'd dual-boot for kicks, except on the netbooks HD space is an issue.
They still want an x86 computer, so that they can still sell to people who want Windows, never mind if it chugs along slowly.
Actually, that's pretty true. I got the Acer One Note thingy mentioned in the article. It came with a Linux on training wheels kinda thing ("Linpus," they called it) that vaguely resembled an XP desktop with 4 buttons. I booted it, turned it off, and installed memory (had to remove the keyboard and the motherboard to install the memory underneath the motherboard!) and put the whole thing back together again.
Installing Windows from an external CD-ROM drive took forever, and running it was horribly slow. (I put Windows Server 2003 Standard on there; "Microsoft Dreamspark" is giving away free licenses to college students.) It would hard-lock on any disk access, and the machine would be unusable until the current transaction finished and the little green light blinked off.
The problem seems to be that Windows loves to do a bunch of little writes to disk. All the time. It'll log transactions in buffers in memory, and it won't flush them until the disk is idle, or it has a lot of writes pending, or it otherwise thinks it's a good time. Works fine on hard disks, but the 8 GB SSD in the Acer OneNote (and others, I'd assume) is NOT going to be winning any performance awards anytime soon. The read/write speeds were worse than my flash drive.
So, I installed EWF drivers on the thing. (Think the file system drivers that make Linux Live CDs work, only designed for XP embedded.) The idea is to run Windows off of a read-only volume, so EWF drivers commit file system changes to memory rather than disk. (If you want, you can later write those changes to disk all at once.) All soon as disk access was effectively read only, bam!, everything was lightning fast.
SSD companies have complained that Windows drivers are full of fail, and I suspect that they're right. But, with EWF on, the thing runs World of Warcraft, Office 2007, and Firefox 3 flawlessly. (It even played back 1080p h264 files without a hitch.) You can also do nifty things like delete all the icons on your desktop, reboot and have them still be there, which is a fun trick to show people.
So, with memory and sales tax, the entire computer cost me $430. It does everything I wanted it to do (be a big PDA and take notes in class), and even plays a few games. (World of Warcraft, I haven't gotten around to installing anything else on it. I game on my desktop, and when I do, it's usually not WoW ^.^)
Point of this long, rambling post: If you're willing to tweak things a little bit (this is /., so tweaking Windows shouldn't be a problem) you can make Windows absolutely scream on these webnotes. (Bluee screen of death notes?) Windows isn't that bloated that it won't run on an Atom.
So come on and hit me without hiding behind an anonymous troll, who thinks enviromentalists are the scum of the earth and why?
People think that way because everyone has their own definition of "environmentalist." I consider myself an environmentalist. But, others don't consider conservationists as environmentalists, or think only Greenpeace terrorists are environmentalists, or maintain any number of skewed and biased misconceptions.
The problem is that environmentalism of all stripes is largely political and has its share of hypocrisy. The Sierra club has oil wells on their nature preserves, Al Gore has a $4k/month electric bill, and everybody flies and drives. It's easy to scorn hypocrisy and disregard any of the larger ideals.
I would personally stop short at "scum of the earth," but some people who label themselves environmentalists are misguided. You say you know where food comes from - I do, too. Both of my parents, and their parents, and their parents unto the time when Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church on Sundays, were farmers.
But, food comes from a store. You'll say, "Wait, you idiot! Someone has to grow it!" But, if the store has food, somebody somewhere is growing it. If the food is inexpensive, it's an indicator that a lot of somebodies somewhere are growing it. The miracle of the modern era is that farms are more productive - less land feeds more people - and that food can be shipped almost anywhere.
The lack of green space is simply a side effect of A) existing land being used more efficiently and B) food being grown elsewhere, where it's more productive to do so. No pillaging and plundering involved, unless you count the misguided who label themselves as protectionists/intellectuals/whatever who lock the third world out of our marekts with tariffs.
C may not be the "best" language for parallel processing, but it's not like it's impossible, or difficult, or not recommended. You ARE dependent on your operating system for multitasking, but it's not like POSIX processes are that horrible, and Windows threads are actually pretty stupidly easy.
Developing an algorithm that can be parallelized (did I invent a word?) is harder. But, if you can describe something in terms of a Nondeterministic Finite Automaton, you already have something that can be made massively parallel, so win!
I'm sorry, but if a company is making it impossible for DUI prosecutions to be done fairly, the company officers should be sitting in jail whilst we wait to find out if they can get the source code together or not.
Or maybe, better yet, if a breathalyser's results can't be used in court, that company should lose a lot of business.
Having a working product (esp. one that "works" for a particular purpose) is usually a pretty strong selling point.
Actually, you can legally make a copy for a friend. This came up in the 80s with mix tapes.
Really? I know that's true in Canada (and by, "I know," I mean someone who was allegedly Canadian said so /.) but I still think would be infringing stateside.
That's entirely possible for some devices in Windows - the Windows Driver Foundation lets some drivers run in userland. In fact, "all" printer drivers run that way on Vista - the WDF runs as a service and acts as a broker of sorts between userspace and kernelspace.
For other devices, it's just not possible. Try writing a user-mode graphics driver and get back to me.
Yes. A free society lets you do as you will with the works of your hands.