Re:OSX has more jewlery hanging on it than Mr. T
on
OS X
·
· Score: 3
They don't recommend upgrading an existing system at all.
I think that is sage advice from Microsoft for the average home user. Obviously the same doesn't apply for people who know what they're doing. Upgrading from Win9x or NT to 2000 works "sort-of". You get a usable box, but you'll probably start having problems in a week or two.
Clean installs are the way to go, hands down, but most home users can't handle this without shooting themselves in the foot. They'll do something like reformat their box and install their new OS okay, but they didn't have the foresight to download Windows XP versions of their drivers before they did so, so now they're sitting there, running in 640x480 with 16 colors, and they're caught in a Catch 22. Without drivers for their crappy Winmodem, they can't connect to AOL to download the XP versions of their drivers...
This is why for most people, it makes more sense to just wait until you get a new computer, unless you have a technical friend who is willing (or can be bribed with pizza) to spend an entire Saturday at your house, installing the new OS for you. Or, will let you bring your box over to his place, where he can use his cable modem to grab drivers and BIOS updates, etc. as needed.
In short, upgrading from Win9x to XP isn't going to be as simple as popping in a CD and clicking "Upgrade". On the surface, it will be, but the user isn't going to have a very good experience with the OS, and Microsoft will start hearing the same sort of complaints that Apple is suffering right now. ---
From my experience, you run out of memory pretty fast.
Absolutely, if you're a hard-core user on the classic MacOS, you need hundreds of megabytes of RAM. I worked in a Mac shop when I was in college, doing a lot of FileMaker & Photoshop work, and having to tinker with the RAM settings for each application was my biggest gripe about using the Macintosh. To get acceptable performance, I'd wind up dedicating 40MB of RAM to Netscape, 80MB to FileMaker and 128MB to Photoshop.
As a Windows user by nature, I got frustrated rather quickly with the non-protected memory and having to specify how much RAM my applications needed. I always felt like I was supposed to be psychic about what I was going to be doing later in the day..
Now, with the release of OS X, I'm thinking about buying myself a Mac portable (probably the next incarnation of the iBook) after Apple starts shipping them with OS X pre-installed. It's not that I can't handle installing it myself or anything, but I don't feel like shelling out $1500 for a new system, then $130 for the OS, when I can wait three months and get it included in a more stable format... ---
Oh really? New features, huh? Name some. Please. I'd like to know what all these "New Features" are that justify an entirely new release of their operating system.
Okay, howabout Internet Connection Sharing? It elminated the need to purchase a proxy server for many people interested in sharing their cable/DSL/modem connections between two computers. Sure, you wouldn't want to run a corporate intranet through it, but if you just want a second computer for your wife/kids to surf the web on, it's a great solution. Yes, I know you can do the same thing with a linux box, etc.
I'm replying to my own post here, but it appears that "A total of 141 people were arrested, 19 were hanged and one was crushed to death", according to this page... ---
There were at least six women killed in Salem alone.
But the madness that was the witch trials spread all throughout Mass. Many others were put to death, and hundreds were accused.
The Salem Witch trials, to me, are the perfect example for the need for separation of church and state, lest heresy become a capital offense once more...
---
I saw on the web that Battlefield Earth is supposedly doing quite well in DVD sales, considering it was a major bomb at the box office.
I haven't seen it myself, but I did read Hubbard's book, and I have to wonder if the reason the DVD is selling so well is because Scientologists are buying it up en masse. I recall reading an article in Time magazine that revealed that the "Church" of Scientology buys thousands of copies of Hubbard's books, in order to keep them rated as Best-sellers... ---
At Iowa State University, my alma mater, the library subscribes to Playboy, meaning it is already in the library, and available for your perusal. There actually are legitimate articles in it, I loaned a female student one of my issues so she could cite an article for a research paper.
If you're talking about porn, use Hustler as your example, not Playboy. The pictures in Playboy are airbrushed stylizations of surgically augmented stereotypical women fantasy objects, not pornography... ---
And requiring the CD is just a royal pain in the ass sometimes. I use the NoCD patch for Microsft's Age of Kings: The Conquerors. I own the game, but my computer here at home takes about 2 minutes to authenticate the CD and launch. With the NO-CD patch, it takes about 5 seconds.
I also used it to install the game on my work computer, for those days when I'm feeling a little bored. I never know when I'm going to want to play it, and don't feel like carrying the CD back and forth each day.
At the risk of sounding like a Microsoft fan, this authentication mess with Sony only provides more incentive for people to buy an X-Box from MSFT. ---
Not to mention MP3 player manufacturers. I just got my nifty Rio 500 to listen to while I work out. I've outfitted it with 128MB of storage, and now you're telling me I can't take the music off of my CDs and copy it to my device? But CDs skip, and they players are much more heavy and bulky than my little MP3 player...
Fair use is a legit concern here, and I'm hoping that this technology dies a quick death. ---
I feel the same way about Microsoft's new protection schemes with their software. My legit copy of FrontPage 2000 refused to let me install it on my home computer one day, following a fresh install on a new hard drive. I had to call Microsoft and get them to unlock it for me, something that they'll only do a maximum of ten times. I'm a power user, I upgrade a LOT, and am always re-partitioning to play with some new Linux distribution, etc.
My solution? Simple, I pirate it from work where we have licensing program copies that don't feature the lock-out mechanism. Thanks for making me a pirate, Microsoft! ---
Absolutely, 6 months ago, I would have said that ST:TNG was the best series. Then I got a TiVo, and discovered the DS9 reruns that our local ABC station airs late at night.
Seasons 6 and 7 (about halfway through 7 now) are brilliant. It's nice to have stories that aren't resolved in an hour, and have characters who remember and reference events in past episodes.
If you were like me, and sort of tuned out of DS9 after the first few seasons, check out the last two. You'll be blown away. I can't wait for the finale, which I haven't seen yet... ---
It's possible, I'm not a Linux expert by any means. I've set up basic www and apache servers, and play around with it as a desktop OS from time to time.
I just ran into the problem of the ICQ RPM needing another RPM which needed four other RPM's which needed 12 more RPM's...
You wind up needing to replace half your OS to run an application, which ticks me off.
I'm not a moron, I could learn the intricacies of the operating system, but I don't want to. I want it to "just work". I guess I'm old fashioned that way... ---
Real software takes a while to install. The trouble is with people who expect otherwise.
Absolutely, but I've spent half an hour updating RPM's just to get an ICQ client to work on my Linux box before. Double click an.exe on my Windows box is much easier. ---
Absolutely, I stopped watchind DS9 after the third or fourth season, when I was in college. I liked it, but it got to be too confusing about when a new episode was on, as the Fox affiliates here liked to run them every single night, but one night a week is a "new" episode and the rest are re-runs. Anyhow, I basically tuned out, got busy with school, etc.
Now, I've got more free time, and a TiVo! It's on every night here on our ABC affiliate, and I tuned it towards the start of the sixth season. It's incredible! The war with the Dominion episodes are outstanding, stories arc across entire seasons, and there is actual drama and emotion...
I read somewhere that this happened because Paramount was busy with Voyager, so they stopped paying attention to DS9, which allowed DS9 to bend the rules a bit, and do whatever they wanted to do. The resulting episodes are spectacular, and if the new Star Trek series wants to truly be successful, they'd be wise to look at those last two seasons of Deep Space Nine and follow the same sort of pattern.
I tuned out of Voyager after the second or third season, much for the same reason as Deep Space Nine, it became too much work to keep track of new episodes, and a lot of them got too repetitive. A new species shows up, threatens Voyager, Janeway kicks their butts, or makes peace with them, and Voyager continues on its merry way.
I'm not trying to bash Voyager, there are some good episodes of it, but it just didn't hold my attention the way ST:TNG and now DS9 do. Maybe when I can start watching all Voyager episodes in order via my TiVo, I'll come to appreciate it more.
Anyone have any news on the DVD releases of ST:TNG? The little inserts that come with the Original Series DVD's say that it's "coming soon". I'm hoping that they bundle entire seasons, like the X-Files, but I'm sure that Paramount will screw the fans by selling them only 2 episodes at a time, requiring us to have to store 90 DVD's to get the whole series... ---
It's also quite likely that they didn't want you to start installing Linux for a bunch of students who couldn't manage it themselves. The last thing that the typically overworked and underpaid university IT staff need are 2000 Linux newbies flooding the help line and support desks with questions about Linux on their dorm computers.
That said, I don't think they can, or should, discourage a student group from forming. They may, however, ask you to make it clear to anyone that you give Linux to, that they're not going to receive any help from the support staff, other than being assigned an IP address... ---
I know, I wish Slashdot had the same type of WYSIWYG editor that my weblog does. It uses Manila, from Userland, to allow WYSIWYG in IE 5+ for Windows, at least. I know that isn't the Slashdot audience, but I'm betting 30% of the hits here come on IE... ---
Re:Mild spelling flame: it's TANSTAAFL (nt)
on
Juno And Privacy
·
· Score: 2
Of course, I've read everything he wrote, just forgot my timeline for a second. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was practically a libertarian manifesto, so of course that's where it would appear. Didn't the Loonies even put it on their flag? ---
Believe it or not, you can still buy a lot of the stuff from the Transformer's movie. I just got the DVD version, too bad there really aren't any extras on it...
You can still get it on VHS, as well as the soundtrack on CD. I had a good laugh watching Boogie Nights, when Wahlberg's character is singing/screeching "You've got the touch!" which is straight from this soundtrack...
My other friends kind of make fun of me for having them, since they think G.I. Joe was cooler, but what do they know...
Okay, those are shameless links to Amazon.com, but it's much better than paying the inflated prices that Sam Goody charges for this stuff... ---
I'm not sure about other OEM's, but with the new Dells here at work, the Windows 2000 CD is an actual Windows 2000 CD, but it will only install itself on Dell computers. I'm not sure if they're reading something from BIOS/CMOS or what, but they refuse to install Win2000 on a Gateway. They do work on older Dell boxes though, so as long as your friend has the same manufacturer as you, you can still pirate to your heart's content...
Microsoft has actually encouraged me to pirate software with this stuff. The lock-out that takes place with Office 2000 really pissed me off. My legit copy of FrontPage 2000 refused to let me install it after wiping my machine last spring, I called Microsoft, and they said they could give me the code to unlock the software, but would only do this a maximum of ten times.
Now that I'm running Windows 2000, that's not quite as inconvenient, but with Windows 98/ME, it wouldn't be uncommon for a power user to have to reformat every couple of months.
My solution? Just bring the CD home from work, we've got the MOLP editions, which don't have these lame-brain schemes coded into them. ---
As someone else mentioned above, pencils leave dust behind, both when using and erasing, as well as when sharpening. This isn't a problem here on earth, but in space, you don't exactly want a lot of graphite and wood shavings floating around, mucking up your electrical equipment, your air filters/scrubbers, and your lungs. ---
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They don't recommend upgrading an existing system at all.
I think that is sage advice from Microsoft for the average home user. Obviously the same doesn't apply for people who know what they're doing. Upgrading from Win9x or NT to 2000 works "sort-of". You get a usable box, but you'll probably start having problems in a week or two.
Clean installs are the way to go, hands down, but most home users can't handle this without shooting themselves in the foot. They'll do something like reformat their box and install their new OS okay, but they didn't have the foresight to download Windows XP versions of their drivers before they did so, so now they're sitting there, running in 640x480 with 16 colors, and they're caught in a Catch 22. Without drivers for their crappy Winmodem, they can't connect to AOL to download the XP versions of their drivers...
This is why for most people, it makes more sense to just wait until you get a new computer, unless you have a technical friend who is willing (or can be bribed with pizza) to spend an entire Saturday at your house, installing the new OS for you. Or, will let you bring your box over to his place, where he can use his cable modem to grab drivers and BIOS updates, etc. as needed.
In short, upgrading from Win9x to XP isn't going to be as simple as popping in a CD and clicking "Upgrade". On the surface, it will be, but the user isn't going to have a very good experience with the OS, and Microsoft will start hearing the same sort of complaints that Apple is suffering right now.
---
From my experience, you run out of memory pretty fast.
Absolutely, if you're a hard-core user on the classic MacOS, you need hundreds of megabytes of RAM. I worked in a Mac shop when I was in college, doing a lot of FileMaker & Photoshop work, and having to tinker with the RAM settings for each application was my biggest gripe about using the Macintosh. To get acceptable performance, I'd wind up dedicating 40MB of RAM to Netscape, 80MB to FileMaker and 128MB to Photoshop.
As a Windows user by nature, I got frustrated rather quickly with the non-protected memory and having to specify how much RAM my applications needed. I always felt like I was supposed to be psychic about what I was going to be doing later in the day..
Now, with the release of OS X, I'm thinking about buying myself a Mac portable (probably the next incarnation of the iBook) after Apple starts shipping them with OS X pre-installed. It's not that I can't handle installing it myself or anything, but I don't feel like shelling out $1500 for a new system, then $130 for the OS, when I can wait three months and get it included in a more stable format...
---
Oh really? New features, huh? Name some. Please. I'd like to know what all these "New Features" are that justify an entirely new release of their operating system.
Okay, howabout Internet Connection Sharing? It elminated the need to purchase a proxy server for many people interested in sharing their cable/DSL/modem connections between two computers. Sure, you wouldn't want to run a corporate intranet through it, but if you just want a second computer for your wife/kids to surf the web on, it's a great solution. Yes, I know you can do the same thing with a linux box, etc.
---
I'm replying to my own post here, but it appears that "A total of 141 people were arrested, 19 were hanged and one was crushed to death", according to this page...
---
There were at least six women killed in Salem alone. But the madness that was the witch trials spread all throughout Mass. Many others were put to death, and hundreds were accused. The Salem Witch trials, to me, are the perfect example for the need for separation of church and state, lest heresy become a capital offense once more...
---
I saw on the web that Battlefield Earth is supposedly doing quite well in DVD sales, considering it was a major bomb at the box office.
I haven't seen it myself, but I did read Hubbard's book, and I have to wonder if the reason the DVD is selling so well is because Scientologists are buying it up en masse. I recall reading an article in Time magazine that revealed that the "Church" of Scientology buys thousands of copies of Hubbard's books, in order to keep them rated as Best-sellers...
---
At Iowa State University, my alma mater, the library subscribes to Playboy, meaning it is already in the library, and available for your perusal. There actually are legitimate articles in it, I loaned a female student one of my issues so she could cite an article for a research paper.
If you're talking about porn, use Hustler as your example, not Playboy. The pictures in Playboy are airbrushed stylizations of surgically augmented stereotypical women fantasy objects, not pornography...
---
And requiring the CD is just a royal pain in the ass sometimes. I use the NoCD patch for Microsft's Age of Kings: The Conquerors. I own the game, but my computer here at home takes about 2 minutes to authenticate the CD and launch. With the NO-CD patch, it takes about 5 seconds.
I also used it to install the game on my work computer, for those days when I'm feeling a little bored. I never know when I'm going to want to play it, and don't feel like carrying the CD back and forth each day.
At the risk of sounding like a Microsoft fan, this authentication mess with Sony only provides more incentive for people to buy an X-Box from MSFT.
---
Not to mention MP3 player manufacturers. I just got my nifty Rio 500 to listen to while I work out. I've outfitted it with 128MB of storage, and now you're telling me I can't take the music off of my CDs and copy it to my device? But CDs skip, and they players are much more heavy and bulky than my little MP3 player...
Fair use is a legit concern here, and I'm hoping that this technology dies a quick death.
---
I feel the same way about Microsoft's new protection schemes with their software. My legit copy of FrontPage 2000 refused to let me install it on my home computer one day, following a fresh install on a new hard drive. I had to call Microsoft and get them to unlock it for me, something that they'll only do a maximum of ten times. I'm a power user, I upgrade a LOT, and am always re-partitioning to play with some new Linux distribution, etc.
My solution? Simple, I pirate it from work where we have licensing program copies that don't feature the lock-out mechanism. Thanks for making me a pirate, Microsoft!
---
Is it just me, or isn't this new series supposed to take place before the warp drive was invented by Zephram Cochran (à la First Contact)?
That would be the most boring series possible. They wouldn't have even gotten out of the solar system by the end of the 7th season...
---
Absolutely, 6 months ago, I would have said that ST:TNG was the best series. Then I got a TiVo, and discovered the DS9 reruns that our local ABC station airs late at night.
Seasons 6 and 7 (about halfway through 7 now) are brilliant. It's nice to have stories that aren't resolved in an hour, and have characters who remember and reference events in past episodes.
If you were like me, and sort of tuned out of DS9 after the first few seasons, check out the last two. You'll be blown away. I can't wait for the finale, which I haven't seen yet...
---
It's possible, I'm not a Linux expert by any means. I've set up basic www and apache servers, and play around with it as a desktop OS from time to time.
I just ran into the problem of the ICQ RPM needing another RPM which needed four other RPM's which needed 12 more RPM's...
You wind up needing to replace half your OS to run an application, which ticks me off.
I'm not a moron, I could learn the intricacies of the operating system, but I don't want to. I want it to "just work". I guess I'm old fashioned that way...
---
Real software takes a while to install. The trouble is with people who expect otherwise.
.exe on my Windows box is much easier.
Absolutely, but I've spent half an hour updating RPM's just to get an ICQ client to work on my Linux box before. Double click an
---
Absolutely, I stopped watchind DS9 after the third or fourth season, when I was in college. I liked it, but it got to be too confusing about when a new episode was on, as the Fox affiliates here liked to run them every single night, but one night a week is a "new" episode and the rest are re-runs. Anyhow, I basically tuned out, got busy with school, etc.
Now, I've got more free time, and a TiVo! It's on every night here on our ABC affiliate, and I tuned it towards the start of the sixth season. It's incredible! The war with the Dominion episodes are outstanding, stories arc across entire seasons, and there is actual drama and emotion...
I read somewhere that this happened because Paramount was busy with Voyager, so they stopped paying attention to DS9, which allowed DS9 to bend the rules a bit, and do whatever they wanted to do. The resulting episodes are spectacular, and if the new Star Trek series wants to truly be successful, they'd be wise to look at those last two seasons of Deep Space Nine and follow the same sort of pattern.
I tuned out of Voyager after the second or third season, much for the same reason as Deep Space Nine, it became too much work to keep track of new episodes, and a lot of them got too repetitive. A new species shows up, threatens Voyager, Janeway kicks their butts, or makes peace with them, and Voyager continues on its merry way.
I'm not trying to bash Voyager, there are some good episodes of it, but it just didn't hold my attention the way ST:TNG and now DS9 do. Maybe when I can start watching all Voyager episodes in order via my TiVo, I'll come to appreciate it more.
Anyone have any news on the DVD releases of ST:TNG? The little inserts that come with the Original Series DVD's say that it's "coming soon". I'm hoping that they bundle entire seasons, like the X-Files, but I'm sure that Paramount will screw the fans by selling them only 2 episodes at a time, requiring us to have to store 90 DVD's to get the whole series...
---
It's also quite likely that they didn't want you to start installing Linux for a bunch of students who couldn't manage it themselves. The last thing that the typically overworked and underpaid university IT staff need are 2000 Linux newbies flooding the help line and support desks with questions about Linux on their dorm computers.
That said, I don't think they can, or should, discourage a student group from forming. They may, however, ask you to make it clear to anyone that you give Linux to, that they're not going to receive any help from the support staff, other than being assigned an IP address...
---
I think you mean Netscape 6.01, not 6.1. I've downloaded it, and haven't found any real differences as of yet...
---
I know, I wish Slashdot had the same type of WYSIWYG editor that my weblog does. It uses Manila, from Userland, to allow WYSIWYG in IE 5+ for Windows, at least. I know that isn't the Slashdot audience, but I'm betting 30% of the hits here come on IE...
---
Of course, I've read everything he wrote, just forgot my timeline for a second. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was practically a libertarian manifesto, so of course that's where it would appear. Didn't the Loonies even put it on their flag?
---
Why not send dwarves/midgets? They're even smaller! You could build smaller vehicles, smaller spacesuits, pack less food, etc.
Send Mini-Me to Mars!
---
What's the origin of TANSTAAFL? The first place I saw it was a Heinlein book... Maybe the Cat Who Walks Through Walls?
---
Of course, Phillip Morris runs ads touting that they gave $2 million to the halfway house for runaway kids.
Yup, they gave $2 million to that charity. Then they spent $118 million to brag about it on T.V.
Why do I think that they didn't do it out of the goodness of their hearts?
---
Believe it or not, you can still buy a lot of the stuff from the Transformer's movie. I just got the DVD version, too bad there really aren't any extras on it...
You can still get it on VHS, as well as the soundtrack on CD. I had a good laugh watching Boogie Nights, when Wahlberg's character is singing/screeching "You've got the touch!" which is straight from this soundtrack...
My other friends kind of make fun of me for having them, since they think G.I. Joe was cooler, but what do they know...
Okay, those are shameless links to Amazon.com, but it's much better than paying the inflated prices that Sam Goody charges for this stuff...
---
I'm not sure about other OEM's, but with the new Dells here at work, the Windows 2000 CD is an actual Windows 2000 CD, but it will only install itself on Dell computers. I'm not sure if they're reading something from BIOS/CMOS or what, but they refuse to install Win2000 on a Gateway. They do work on older Dell boxes though, so as long as your friend has the same manufacturer as you, you can still pirate to your heart's content...
Microsoft has actually encouraged me to pirate software with this stuff. The lock-out that takes place with Office 2000 really pissed me off. My legit copy of FrontPage 2000 refused to let me install it after wiping my machine last spring, I called Microsoft, and they said they could give me the code to unlock the software, but would only do this a maximum of ten times.
Now that I'm running Windows 2000, that's not quite as inconvenient, but with Windows 98/ME, it wouldn't be uncommon for a power user to have to reformat every couple of months.
My solution? Just bring the CD home from work, we've got the MOLP editions, which don't have these lame-brain schemes coded into them.
---
As someone else mentioned above, pencils leave dust behind, both when using and erasing, as well as when sharpening. This isn't a problem here on earth, but in space, you don't exactly want a lot of graphite and wood shavings floating around, mucking up your electrical equipment, your air filters/scrubbers, and your lungs.
---