I live where it gets plenty cold, and I have one thing to say:
People are just wussies.
No, it's NOT going to sit and idle the same amount of time. When I start my car up, it idles for about 10 seconds; that's how much time it takes to circulate the oil. By then I've scraped the car already on the outside. The inside won't fog up if you put the defroster on medium or high to keep moist air away from it, and crack the rear windows a bit.
I actually ride a bike to work most days (regardless of temp, I've ridden at -25*F so far) but when I drive, I scrape the ice and snow off, get in, start it up, and I'm rolling in 15 seconds.
I wouldn't buy a BRICK from DLink anymore. I have yet to see anything made by them that wasn't the worst I'd ever seen of whatever it was. NICs, routers, switches, whatever, they were all crap, with crap drivers, crap firmware, crap everything. They must have the schmoozingest marketing department ever to still be in business.
Great. I don't care about playing games, I wouldn't pay a dime for the feature. I can buy a set top box that plays AVIs for $50. Where's that functionality at that price point (heck, I'll even go to $100) for MKV files?
That's all great. Where do I buy a set-top box for $50 that will play AVC files off a thumb drive?
I don't really dive a damn about chapters, subtitles, lossless dolby digital or any of that other crud. I just want to grab some video in relatively small format, I don't care all that much about quality (though honestly XviDs look fine to me) and watch a TV show from last week.
This is nothing new. Back in the 80s and games on 5.25" floppy disk, I bought my games (hardly anyone did, despite copy protection systems), but I would not buy any game unless it either didn't have copy protection (there was hardly any such thing) or I could get a copy with the copy protection broken.
EVERY time I bought a game, I wrote to the company telling them that I would have bought the title sooner, but I refused to buy anything with copy protection on it, and I had to wait until I could find a cracked copy on the BBS before I bought mine. I sent the letters in along with the registration card to show that they did get my money.
These days, I just don't give anyone money for anything with DRM on it. eBooks, I buy only non-DRMed copies which means I don't get to see a lot of stuff (and they don't get my money) or PD stuff. Movies, well, I consider CSS pretty much the same thing as "no copy protection". Music, I just buy on CD - I don't listen to it on CD, but CD is a nice high quality backup. If someone was selling FLAC instead of a lossy format I might buy that.
Meh, it's running from the bear faster than the guy next to you. Turning on WEP will make most everyone just use the neighbor's unlocked wireless. I can't use WPA because the Nintendo DSs in our house use WEP at best. Besides, our house is in the center of a 2 acre lot with the router in the basement; you can't get a signal from it without coming onto the property.
I have to keep calling and asking my card company to STOP increasing the credit limit. It's at 26K right now, they wanted to run it to 35k but I told them no.
Thanks for this reply. I was thinking the same thing all down this thread. I really don't like Best Buy, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to engage in what is essentially theft and think it's OK because it's only Best Buy. OK, Abbie Hoffman would say it's OK. It doesn't work for me though.
What kind of a machine draws 300-500 watts? I recently built a quad-core machine that has a 500GB and three 1.5TB drives spinning in it and dual monitors, and the main box draws 150 watts. It has a 400 watt power supply, but that doesn't mean that it's always drawing 400 watts, that's what it's CAPABLE of delivering.
I stopped shopping at Best Buy several years ago when they basically announced that they don't want well informed consumers, they only want suckers. They actually came out and said that they were trying to get rid of customers who buy stuff on sale and who always fill out the rebate forms in favor of people who buy at full price and forget to fill out/send in the rebate forms.
Perhaps some day, instead of releasing entire novels, authors will release single chapters, wait until enough people have paid, and then release the next chapter, and so forth, until the entire novel is complete.
I don't even start reading the first book in a series until the last book is in print. I'm certainly not interested in reading a book one chapter at a time.
We lose power for > 24 hours here about once every couple of years. Sometimes 3 or 4 days at a time. That's why WE have a generator.
POTS switching stations also usually die after a day or two, too. At least, last time we lost power for a long time we lost dialtone after 2 days I think.
I don't think so. I clearly remember an instance between 10 and 15 years ago where a router misconfiguration started a cascading failure that caused a wave of router crashes that bounced back and forth between the east and west coast. The network was largely non-functional for at least minutes, ISTR it was more like an hour, and it wasn't fully back up to speed for hours afterwards.
The number of nines that you indicate would mean that they are down about 1 second in 3200 years. Even if they were only down 5 minutes that time, and even if that was the only time they've ever been down, that one 5 minute outage would mean that they're not allowed to have ANY more downtime in the next million years, and THEN they'll have achieved that number of nines.
However, I do agree, if you need a phone in an emergency, your best bet is an analog POTS line.
Our internet service goes down instantly when we lose power, even if all my equipment is running on battery backup. The ISP says that's impossible, that their equipment is battery backed. They're lying though.
Oh, and there's essentially zero cell coverage at our house. If you go outside, you can kind of almost get a little bit of a bar and you might be able to get a call through, but it'll be garbled and guaranteed to drop within a minute. And we live less than 5 miles from a major expressway, 15 miles from a fairly large college town.
The place where I grew up? No high speed except satellite, and the cellular resellers are all charging insane prices for hardly any service. There's no data services at all there AFAIK. And I know a lot of people that are in even worse shape. High speed internet is FAR from ubiquitous.
It's actually scientists that have hundreds of words for snow.
Having lived in a place where the average snowfall was 280 inches, I suspect that like the rest of us, by about late February, they have only one phrase for snow, and it's not nice.
You want to talk ugly, have you seen Office 2007? I have never figured out why Microsoft thinks that taking all the functionality and moving it onto brightly-colored toy controls and hiding things behind one another is a good thing.
I got a new machine at work a couple of months ago, I'd tried Office 2007 a while ago and wasn't too impressed. I adked for Office 2003 on the new machine but they refused. I tried to use Office 2007 for about 2 months, and I figured out how to do everything that I needed to do, but the way they have things set up now totally destroys efficient workflow; you simply have to use the mouse for far too many things that you could do with the keyboard before. That tells me that they geared the new system towards casual users and making a sale based on flashy first impressions, not facilitating serious work.
Bottom line, I put my 6 year old Windows XP box back on my desk, the new machine is sitting in a drawer, but I'm getting work done a lot faster with the old single core P4 box with XP and Office 2003 on it, than I could with the new box, regardless of how much time I put into learning the "new way".
Oh, and I use OpenOffice pretty much interchangably with Office 2003, and certainly FAR before I'd use Office 2007. I am NOT a user of advanced features on any of the programs in the suite, but I've never found anything that I needed to do that OpenOffice didn't do.
No, they determined that it was very difficult and that they would be unlikely to be able to reproduce it without taking up a lot of time to no real purpose. But at the same time, they had someone on the show that it had happened to, so it was actually confirmed, but extremely unlikely.
How will I decide that ads at some level are OK; once I started running AdBlock, I just didn't see any ads anymore. I can't make a decision that these ads are OK because I never see them.
FWIW, when I visit sites on other people's machines, the ads still bother me. And I've been using the web since it was invented (and the internet in general before that, with FTP sites and remote terminal login) and I have yet to click on an ad, let alone buy something from one.
Also, Chrome's ad blockers stink. The ads pop up anyway, then they disappear. It's very irritating. Apparently it has something to do with the architecture they've provided for plugins.
You're afraid of getting slightly warm in a small part of your body?
News flash; if you hold a piece of plastic against your head for a few minutes, when you take it away, that part of your body will be a little warmer than the surrounding, uncovered skin. Even moreso if you put a lithium ion battery inside that's discharging at a high enough rate to warm up a few degrees. This doesn't have ANYTHING to do with the emitted radiation, which even at its peak (if you are in an area with very little signal, and the phone is cranking up its power to reach the tower) couldn't raise the temp of a few square inches of skin more than a fraction of a degree, even if all that power were being intentionally directed into your skin.
When researching what new printer to buy, I make sure that I can refill them easily and cheaply.
When I was doing inkjet, I had a Canon i970, where each color is a separate tank, and refilling involved popping the top open, squirting ink in with a syringe and resealing it, about 2 minutes and 50 cents instead of $8 for a new tank.
I gave up on inkjet though; the only reason to go inkjet is to print color photos, and you can get photos printed at the drug store or walmart or something by uploading them online, and they'll have them printed by the time you get there (I pick mine up on the way to work, so no extra travel either) and it's cheaper than what the ink and paper would cost me, and I don't have to maintain anything.
I currently have a Brother HL-4040CN networked laser printer, which I bought on sale for $200. Refills for all 4 colors are $99 (versus new carts for about $500 for the set of 4). Works great, can sit there drawing 1 watt for weeks and prints from anyone on the network, and was recognized and set up perfectly by Ubuntu 9.10, Windows XP, Vista and 7. Refilling it involves opening a port, squirting in toner, sealing the port, turning a gear to reset the page count on the cart, and putting it back in.
I bought a 2nd printer for $200; because I like the printer and figured it can't hurt to have a spare, and besides, toner carts do eventually die, and $50 each was a good price for replacement toner carts even if I just threw the printer away.
I also only print maybe 5 to 10 pages a day, I've had this printer almost a year and still am on the original carts, I have no idea how long they'll last.
I have CD-Rs that were recorded around 1994 (the recorder was the size of a standard size PC case, cost $3500 and recorded at 2X - and with hard drive speeds at the time and no buffer underrun protection, you couldn't even touch the mouse or you'd burn a coaster) that are fine. I have a spindle of 50 of them, and I pull them out every few years and run a sampling through Nero CD Speed which detects even low-level errors that would normally be corrected.
These are all still fine, with only one or two correctable errors per CD, about the same as a freshly-burned CD.
The problem, I suspect, is that you're using cheap discs. These were recorded on Kodak gold datalife discs, they cost about $5 each at the time. Also, they're in a spindle in a dry basement with very constant temperature and low light.
It'd be nice if ANY of the duplicate-posted slashdot stories about Natal linked to a page that wasn't crushed or suspended, so I could find out WTF Natal is.
Ah, wait. I see a link up the page. AAAAND, it's something to do with gaming. OK, not interested.
I used to use Password Safe, but have switched completely to supergenpass.
I don't think it works (as a bookmarklet) in Chrome, fwiw.
I have a separate copy up on my personal website in case I have to log in somewhere from someone else's machine where I don't have the bookmarklet installed. It's a little bit of a pain, but it's much less so than having to carry a thumb drive around with a portable copy of Password Safe and my PS file, plus having to keep the thumb drive, work machine and home machine copies of my PS files updated all the time.
Slashdot Mirror
I live where it gets plenty cold, and I have one thing to say:
People are just wussies.
No, it's NOT going to sit and idle the same amount of time. When I start my car up, it idles for about 10 seconds; that's how much time it takes to circulate the oil. By then I've scraped the car already on the outside. The inside won't fog up if you put the defroster on medium or high to keep moist air away from it, and crack the rear windows a bit.
I actually ride a bike to work most days (regardless of temp, I've ridden at -25*F so far) but when I drive, I scrape the ice and snow off, get in, start it up, and I'm rolling in 15 seconds.
I wouldn't buy a BRICK from DLink anymore. I have yet to see anything made by them that wasn't the worst I'd ever seen of whatever it was. NICs, routers, switches, whatever, they were all crap, with crap drivers, crap firmware, crap everything. They must have the schmoozingest marketing department ever to still be in business.
Great. I don't care about playing games, I wouldn't pay a dime for the feature. I can buy a set top box that plays AVIs for $50. Where's that functionality at that price point (heck, I'll even go to $100) for MKV files?
That's all great. Where do I buy a set-top box for $50 that will play AVC files off a thumb drive?
I don't really dive a damn about chapters, subtitles, lossless dolby digital or any of that other crud. I just want to grab some video in relatively small format, I don't care all that much about quality (though honestly XviDs look fine to me) and watch a TV show from last week.
I think you meant that you were bored in class, not that you were a flat piece of wood in class. I could be wrong though.
This is nothing new. Back in the 80s and games on 5.25" floppy disk, I bought my games (hardly anyone did, despite copy protection systems), but I would not buy any game unless it either didn't have copy protection (there was hardly any such thing) or I could get a copy with the copy protection broken.
EVERY time I bought a game, I wrote to the company telling them that I would have bought the title sooner, but I refused to buy anything with copy protection on it, and I had to wait until I could find a cracked copy on the BBS before I bought mine. I sent the letters in along with the registration card to show that they did get my money.
These days, I just don't give anyone money for anything with DRM on it. eBooks, I buy only non-DRMed copies which means I don't get to see a lot of stuff (and they don't get my money) or PD stuff. Movies, well, I consider CSS pretty much the same thing as "no copy protection". Music, I just buy on CD - I don't listen to it on CD, but CD is a nice high quality backup. If someone was selling FLAC instead of a lossy format I might buy that.
Meh, it's running from the bear faster than the guy next to you. Turning on WEP will make most everyone just use the neighbor's unlocked wireless.
I can't use WPA because the Nintendo DSs in our house use WEP at best. Besides, our house is in the center of a 2 acre lot with the router in the basement; you can't get a signal from it without coming onto the property.
I have to keep calling and asking my card company to STOP increasing the credit limit. It's at 26K right now, they wanted to run it to 35k but I told them no.
Thanks for this reply. I was thinking the same thing all down this thread. I really don't like Best Buy, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to engage in what is essentially theft and think it's OK because it's only Best Buy.
OK, Abbie Hoffman would say it's OK. It doesn't work for me though.
What kind of a machine draws 300-500 watts? I recently built a quad-core machine that has a 500GB and three 1.5TB drives spinning in it and dual monitors, and the main box draws 150 watts. It has a 400 watt power supply, but that doesn't mean that it's always drawing 400 watts, that's what it's CAPABLE of delivering.
I stopped shopping at Best Buy several years ago when they basically announced that they don't want well informed consumers, they only want suckers. They actually came out and said that they were trying to get rid of customers who buy stuff on sale and who always fill out the rebate forms in favor of people who buy at full price and forget to fill out/send in the rebate forms.
Perhaps some day, instead of releasing entire novels, authors will release single chapters, wait until enough people have paid, and then release the next chapter, and so forth, until the entire novel is complete.
I don't even start reading the first book in a series until the last book is in print. I'm certainly not interested in reading a book one chapter at a time.
We lose power for > 24 hours here about once every couple of years. Sometimes 3 or 4 days at a time. That's why WE have a generator.
POTS switching stations also usually die after a day or two, too. At least, last time we lost power for a long time we lost dialtone after 2 days I think.
I don't think so. I clearly remember an instance between 10 and 15 years ago where a router misconfiguration started a cascading failure that caused a wave of router crashes that bounced back and forth between the east and west coast. The network was largely non-functional for at least minutes, ISTR it was more like an hour, and it wasn't fully back up to speed for hours afterwards.
The number of nines that you indicate would mean that they are down about 1 second in 3200 years. Even if they were only down 5 minutes that time, and even if that was the only time they've ever been down, that one 5 minute outage would mean that they're not allowed to have ANY more downtime in the next million years, and THEN they'll have achieved that number of nines.
However, I do agree, if you need a phone in an emergency, your best bet is an analog POTS line.
Our internet service goes down instantly when we lose power, even if all my equipment is running on battery backup. The ISP says that's impossible, that their equipment is battery backed. They're lying though.
Oh, and there's essentially zero cell coverage at our house. If you go outside, you can kind of almost get a little bit of a bar and you might be able to get a call through, but it'll be garbled and guaranteed to drop within a minute. And we live less than 5 miles from a major expressway, 15 miles from a fairly large college town.
The place where I grew up? No high speed except satellite, and the cellular resellers are all charging insane prices for hardly any service. There's no data services at all there AFAIK. And I know a lot of people that are in even worse shape. High speed internet is FAR from ubiquitous.
It's actually scientists that have hundreds of words for snow.
Having lived in a place where the average snowfall was 280 inches, I suspect that like the rest of us, by about late February, they have only one phrase for snow, and it's not nice.
You want to talk ugly, have you seen Office 2007? I have never figured out why Microsoft thinks that taking all the functionality and moving it onto brightly-colored toy controls and hiding things behind one another is a good thing.
I got a new machine at work a couple of months ago, I'd tried Office 2007 a while ago and wasn't too impressed. I adked for Office 2003 on the new machine but they refused. I tried to use Office 2007 for about 2 months, and I figured out how to do everything that I needed to do, but the way they have things set up now totally destroys efficient workflow; you simply have to use the mouse for far too many things that you could do with the keyboard before. That tells me that they geared the new system towards casual users and making a sale based on flashy first impressions, not facilitating serious work.
Bottom line, I put my 6 year old Windows XP box back on my desk, the new machine is sitting in a drawer, but I'm getting work done a lot faster with the old single core P4 box with XP and Office 2003 on it, than I could with the new box, regardless of how much time I put into learning the "new way".
Oh, and I use OpenOffice pretty much interchangably with Office 2003, and certainly FAR before I'd use Office 2007. I am NOT a user of advanced features on any of the programs in the suite, but I've never found anything that I needed to do that OpenOffice didn't do.
No, they determined that it was very difficult and that they would be unlikely to be able to reproduce it without taking up a lot of time to no real purpose. But at the same time, they had someone on the show that it had happened to, so it was actually confirmed, but extremely unlikely.
How will I decide that ads at some level are OK; once I started running AdBlock, I just didn't see any ads anymore. I can't make a decision that these ads are OK because I never see them.
FWIW, when I visit sites on other people's machines, the ads still bother me. And I've been using the web since it was invented (and the internet in general before that, with FTP sites and remote terminal login) and I have yet to click on an ad, let alone buy something from one.
Also, Chrome's ad blockers stink. The ads pop up anyway, then they disappear. It's very irritating. Apparently it has something to do with the architecture they've provided for plugins.
You're afraid of getting slightly warm in a small part of your body?
News flash; if you hold a piece of plastic against your head for a few minutes, when you take it away, that part of your body will be a little warmer than the surrounding, uncovered skin. Even moreso if you put a lithium ion battery inside that's discharging at a high enough rate to warm up a few degrees. This doesn't have ANYTHING to do with the emitted radiation, which even at its peak (if you are in an area with very little signal, and the phone is cranking up its power to reach the tower) couldn't raise the temp of a few square inches of skin more than a fraction of a degree, even if all that power were being intentionally directed into your skin.
When researching what new printer to buy, I make sure that I can refill them easily and cheaply.
When I was doing inkjet, I had a Canon i970, where each color is a separate tank, and refilling involved popping the top open, squirting ink in with a syringe and resealing it, about 2 minutes and 50 cents instead of $8 for a new tank.
I gave up on inkjet though; the only reason to go inkjet is to print color photos, and you can get photos printed at the drug store or walmart or something by uploading them online, and they'll have them printed by the time you get there (I pick mine up on the way to work, so no extra travel either) and it's cheaper than what the ink and paper would cost me, and I don't have to maintain anything.
I currently have a Brother HL-4040CN networked laser printer, which I bought on sale for $200. Refills for all 4 colors are $99 (versus new carts for about $500 for the set of 4). Works great, can sit there drawing 1 watt for weeks and prints from anyone on the network, and was recognized and set up perfectly by Ubuntu 9.10, Windows XP, Vista and 7. Refilling it involves opening a port, squirting in toner, sealing the port, turning a gear to reset the page count on the cart, and putting it back in.
I bought a 2nd printer for $200; because I like the printer and figured it can't hurt to have a spare, and besides, toner carts do eventually die, and $50 each was a good price for replacement toner carts even if I just threw the printer away.
I also only print maybe 5 to 10 pages a day, I've had this printer almost a year and still am on the original carts, I have no idea how long they'll last.
To hell with major name brands. I think they all just buy whatever they can get on the asian market.
Taiyo Yuden FTW.
I have CD-Rs that were recorded around 1994 (the recorder was the size of a standard size PC case, cost $3500 and recorded at 2X - and with hard drive speeds at the time and no buffer underrun protection, you couldn't even touch the mouse or you'd burn a coaster) that are fine. I have a spindle of 50 of them, and I pull them out every few years and run a sampling through Nero CD Speed which detects even low-level errors that would normally be corrected.
These are all still fine, with only one or two correctable errors per CD, about the same as a freshly-burned CD.
The problem, I suspect, is that you're using cheap discs. These were recorded on Kodak gold datalife discs, they cost about $5 each at the time. Also, they're in a spindle in a dry basement with very constant temperature and low light.
It'd be nice if ANY of the duplicate-posted slashdot stories about Natal linked to a page that wasn't crushed or suspended, so I could find out WTF Natal is.
Ah, wait. I see a link up the page. AAAAND, it's something to do with gaming. OK, not interested.
I used to use Password Safe, but have switched completely to supergenpass.
I don't think it works (as a bookmarklet) in Chrome, fwiw.
I have a separate copy up on my personal website in case I have to log in somewhere from someone else's machine where I don't have the bookmarklet installed. It's a little bit of a pain, but it's much less so than having to carry a thumb drive around with a portable copy of Password Safe and my PS file, plus having to keep the thumb drive, work machine and home machine copies of my PS files updated all the time.