I built three Mini-ITX systems, only one of which is still in use. I built a 533Mhz goof-off machine fo rthe living room, a 800Mhz server and a 1Ghz unit for my wife. The server and good-off machines were chosen due to noise considerations. The wife needed a new MB anyway. The server was woefully underpowered and has been replaced by an old 866Mhz Del Opitiplex I bought from the local government surplus and the full P3 kicks the VIA chip's butt so much it's not funny. I never did anything with the 533Mhz unit because the TV-Out is less than worthwhile. Those two units are in pieces in my closet. My wife is happy with her unit, plus the NVidia TNT2 PCI video card I tossed in, but her idea of demanding computer use is playing FreeCell.
They are not bad computers, if you realize that they are slow as all get out. When used in the right environments (embedded devices, simple robots, etc...) they probably work well. They are not good desktop machines, however. On a price to performance ratio they suck. They are absurdly expensive for what you get. Especially if you add in the tiny cases. You can easily spend as much or more than a Mac Mini would cost and still end up with a larger, noisier and less powerful computer.
If I decide to go down the tiny PC road again I'm going Mac Mini. It can sit there and stare in awe at my G5 Powermac.
Thinking I might use such a thing, I bought a Palm M100 (the cheapest Palm out at the time) and played with it for a while. After four months I put it down and never picked it back up. After a few months I discovered that the AAA batteries in it had exploded and destroyed it. I never bothered to replace it. My work gave me a iPaq which I also tried to find a use for at work and failed misserably.
What I found out in the end is that PDAs do not do anything I need them to do. Data input is too cumbersome to be worth the effort and I don't really want or need anything else it does.
And I might want a new computer but not know how to put one together. SO I LEARNED HOW TO DO IT.
I learned how to build my own PCs. That is, I learned how to screw the parts into the case, plug everything together and get it working. Hell, I even learned to fix IRQ conflicts and run low-level formatting tools built into hard drive controllers using DEBUG. But you know what? After 16 years of rolling my own PCs I just don't care to do it anymore. I use a new method to get it done. It's called "money".
See, I use money in exchange for someone else's expertise. I don't have to learn a skill I don't care about and someone who knows how to configure computers and make all of the parts work smoothely together puts food on their plates.
Am I lazy? Nope. I work every day for my money. After work I don't want to spend my time dicking around with my PC or learmn to code some missing function into a program. So I use the power of money to get someone else to do it for me.
And no accomplishments ever get done without money. People need to eat. I'm willing to pay someone who can do the job to do it rather than get myself killed because I lack the skills to do it right. We didn't get to the moon because every Tom, Dick, and Harry tried to build rocket ships. We got there because a lot of people were willing to pay the people with the skills to do it. Look at the state of private rocket projects. Not even the great John Carmack can get a rocket going that doesn't crash.
Did you sew youer own clothes? Grow your own food? Build your own house? Make your own medicines? No? Then shut the hell up.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! You don't know many "regular Joes", do you? Most people don't have the time or energy to devote to learning to program. And by the time the average non-inclined person gets good, they've long since given up and paid money to some company that made a product that does what they needed and have left Linux and the FOSS comunity behind and haven't looked back.
But I fear for society in a world where people refuse to learn because they don't want to, instead of can't.
People don't learn specialized (and to them esoteric) skills because they DON'T HAVE THE TIME! Most people have lives. They have things to do. Kids to feed. Jobs. Houses to keep in order. Lawns that need to be mowed. Friends. Relatives. Etc... It's not that people won't learn (well, the current state of the educational system does make it harder to learn new things, but I digress), it's that they have things they'd rather be doing instead of mastering a specialized set of skills to add some functionality to someone else's unfinshed work.
Have you taken the time to learn how to fix every problem you might have with your car? I'm willing to bet money you know the absolute basics, at best. You can put fuel in it, check the radiator, fill the tires, change a flat, you might know how to check your fluid levels and maybe refill anything that's low. But can you rebuild the transmission? Fix the breaks? Probably not.
Is it because you are lazy? No. It's because you have better things to do with your time. Please, for the love of Pete, stop thinking that everyone should have the same interests as you. That's the attitude that's kept Linux off of most desktops for the last 12 years.
Agreed. Most users are NOT programmers and wouldn't know a function if it bit them on the ass. This whole "do it yourself" mantra is just justification for things not being finished. I have used so many "0.9x" versions of software on Linux that never get to 1.0 it makes me sick. Is it too much to ask that a developement team actually finish a release before sending it out in a non-dev package? Or is it assumed that everything Linux is a developer release? If that's the case Linux is doomed as the vast majority of users don't want to program, don't give a damn about programming and wouldn't be good at it in the first place.
After years of being sick of Windows and repeatedly trying to get into Linux I finally bailed last year and bought a Mac.
Way to completely miss the point, Sparky. Mass. doesn't care what software you use. They only care about the file format. You are free to use any program you want as long is can read and write Open Document Format. The Open Document Format is not locked to OOo. Anyone can implement Open Document Format for free. It is a cross-platform, software agnostic format. Unlike.DOC, which is controlled by Microsoft and is frequently broken between version of their Office suite, ODF is not under any single software providers control.
And what about using it as a USB drive? Or they want to use Apple Lossless format?
And why does everyone assume that if you have more than X gigabytes of music you must have stolen it all? I have 17GB in my iTunes library out of 21GB of potential (if I hadn't deleted the songs I didn't like) music. Where did this all come from? 95% from CDs I own that are sitting in my living room (minus the odd CD that only had one song I liked on it and sold to the used CD store). Of the rest most have come from either iTunes Music Store, EMusic.Com and a few from artists websites. How the hell could I have done this? Easy. I've been buying CDs since 1987.
I find the knee-jerk assumption that large storage automatically means theft offensive. Take your "you must be a thief to want this" attitude and ram it up your ass.
The only thing I really remember about the GUS was all of the flamewares between GUS users and SoundBlaster users in the comp.sys.ibm.hardware.soundcards (or very much like that) Usenet newsgroup. It was a pathetic screaming match between entrenched camps of brand-obsessive nerds.
Sadly, while that particular skirmish is long dead, the endless tribal nerdfights continue to this day.
PS: It's "jibs" with a soft "g", you heaven bastards!
I like any alternatve to The Gimp. The Gimp has the worst interface I've seen in a graphics application I've seen since the horror days of DOS-based apps. and many of them were easier to use than The Gimp. The Gimp isn't bad for what you pay for it, but even though it's available for my Mac I still chose to spend money on Photoshop because I can at leats get things done in Photoshop. I don't have the time or energy to try and figure out what the hell The Gimp wants me to do in order to get it to do common tasks. I want to spend my time getting things done.
So, you have a problem with lesbians? When Willow turned lesbian it was a risky move, not the instant ratings builder it is now. And I never felt like they exploited the relationship for ratings. Hell, Willow only actually kissed Tera on screen in the episode where Tera gets killed. They spent most of the time with Willow and Tera exploring the problems people go through in relationships.
As for Cowboy Bebop, I can't say. I don't like Cowboy Bebop.
Best 10 movies of all time? Hardly. There are tons of better movies, non of them science fiction, that would rank in the top 10. Better than Bladerunner? Depends on what you like. I can see how some people would like it better than Bladerunner. I think Bladerunner is a better film, and will have a greater impact that Serenity will, I can see how some people wouldn't like it. Better than Dune? Hell yes. Dune is an impressive attempt to tuen an overrated book into a movie, but it's not a great movie.
The reason they bother is that you can't enter neutured dogs in certain AKA dog shows. Neuticles need to look and feel real to fool the judges. I have friends that are dog show junkies and they hate the Neuticles guys with a passion.
That's odd. I saw Serenity last weekend with friends who had never seen Firefly and they had not trouble keeping up with what was going on. Yes, they lost some of the richness of the story, but they did a fine job of filling in the blanks for most reasonably observant people.
I fail to see the problem. Our language, hell, our entire brains, are built around giving labels to things and catagorizing them. I fail to see what is so bad about breaking things down and seeing what makes them tick. Unless you are one of those "knowledge kills the mystery" folks. Knowing how something works does not lessen my enjoyment of it. Matter of fact it helps me enjoy it more. I get to see into the creative process of the creator of said artwork and that's pretty cool.
I bet you hate knowing how special effects are done in movies.
MS is NOT in a powerless situation. They simply don't want to pay that much money and are taking their ball and going home. We ar seeing a fight between two of the four greediest entities on Earth (the other two being Big Oil and the Pharmacutical (sp?) industies). Nothing more. They will return to the bargaining table soon enough.
I'm not jumping your ass. I'm just venting my frustration that so many people (some of them even post here) beleive that there is some grand mystery to the Pyramids. Like the shape has some magical property or that they were influenced by aliens. People assume that people could not have been smart enough to build them, which is a laughable idea when you look at the things we build today.
And you are right, the only real "mystery" is the exact methods they used to move the blocks. But there is no doubt that human beings did actually move those blocks.
Not to hijak the thread too much, but what "mystery of the pyramids"? People built the largest stone structures they could using the most stable shape they could find. Where's the mystery? And it's not even like they got them right the first time. They had at least one pyramid colapse because the angle was too steep, hence the resulting "bent pyramid" where they changed angles half-way up. And they started with a much simpler design of a series of stepped platforms on top of each other. It's not that hard to think that an engineer looked at that and thought "Hey! I bet we could add sloped sides to that and it would look really cool!" and acted on it.
The only "mystery" is people being unwilling to understand the sheer number of men it took to build them. No one questions how the Great Wall of China was built, and it is a much more impressive engineering feat than the pyramids.
When was the last time you heard about someone taking potshots at the Shuttle? Or any space vehicle?............... I didn't think so.
Why haven't your heard of these events? Because these facilities invest in serious security. You can't get within shooting distance of Cape Kennedey to save your life without getting shot by a guard.
Do you think they're going to build the space elevator in some Kansas cornfield? Not on your life. They are going to build it on a military base in the desert or on some remote island in order to calm people's concerns about falling cables should something snap. And they are going to put some serious security around this thing.
I'm sick and tired of all you scared little Nancies squealing that we should't build Amazing Object X because terrorists are going to attack it. Grow some freaking balls. We can't spend the rest of our lives with our heads burried in the sand because the terrorists might attack something.
I've been doing Customer Support for various sized organizations through the releases of Office 97, Office 2000, Office XP (2002) and Office 2003, and every time there is a new release there are documents that break. Excel spreadsheets and Access databases (hahahahaha!) are the worst offenders, breaking with almost every release. A lot of employee time gets eaten up fixing these corrupted files every cycle. Does MS reimburse us for the time wasted? Nope. We PAY Microsoft for the priviledge of dealing with broken documents.
Moving to an open document format would stop most of this from happenning. It would also remove the only barrier keeping WordPerfect, or the Mac or Linux, out of the office environment: document interchange.
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What is this "Episode 4" shit? It's not "Episode 4", it's not "A New Hope". It's "Star Wars". Period. Damned revisoionist hippies!
I built three Mini-ITX systems, only one of which is still in use. I built a 533Mhz goof-off machine fo rthe living room, a 800Mhz server and a 1Ghz unit for my wife. The server and good-off machines were chosen due to noise considerations. The wife needed a new MB anyway. The server was woefully underpowered and has been replaced by an old 866Mhz Del Opitiplex I bought from the local government surplus and the full P3 kicks the VIA chip's butt so much it's not funny. I never did anything with the 533Mhz unit because the TV-Out is less than worthwhile. Those two units are in pieces in my closet. My wife is happy with her unit, plus the NVidia TNT2 PCI video card I tossed in, but her idea of demanding computer use is playing FreeCell.
They are not bad computers, if you realize that they are slow as all get out. When used in the right environments (embedded devices, simple robots, etc...) they probably work well. They are not good desktop machines, however. On a price to performance ratio they suck. They are absurdly expensive for what you get. Especially if you add in the tiny cases. You can easily spend as much or more than a Mac Mini would cost and still end up with a larger, noisier and less powerful computer.
If I decide to go down the tiny PC road again I'm going Mac Mini. It can sit there and stare in awe at my G5 Powermac.
Thinking I might use such a thing, I bought a Palm M100 (the cheapest Palm out at the time) and played with it for a while. After four months I put it down and never picked it back up. After a few months I discovered that the AAA batteries in it had exploded and destroyed it. I never bothered to replace it. My work gave me a iPaq which I also tried to find a use for at work and failed misserably.
What I found out in the end is that PDAs do not do anything I need them to do. Data input is too cumbersome to be worth the effort and I don't really want or need anything else it does.
What do you expect from a crowd of obsessive compulsives? There are fewer things more pathetic than nerdfights.
Alice works in my office. That FOD really hurts!
I learned how to build my own PCs. That is, I learned how to screw the parts into the case, plug everything together and get it working. Hell, I even learned to fix IRQ conflicts and run low-level formatting tools built into hard drive controllers using DEBUG. But you know what? After 16 years of rolling my own PCs I just don't care to do it anymore. I use a new method to get it done. It's called "money".
See, I use money in exchange for someone else's expertise. I don't have to learn a skill I don't care about and someone who knows how to configure computers and make all of the parts work smoothely together puts food on their plates.
Am I lazy? Nope. I work every day for my money. After work I don't want to spend my time dicking around with my PC or learmn to code some missing function into a program. So I use the power of money to get someone else to do it for me.
And no accomplishments ever get done without money. People need to eat. I'm willing to pay someone who can do the job to do it rather than get myself killed because I lack the skills to do it right. We didn't get to the moon because every Tom, Dick, and Harry tried to build rocket ships. We got there because a lot of people were willing to pay the people with the skills to do it. Look at the state of private rocket projects. Not even the great John Carmack can get a rocket going that doesn't crash.
Did you sew youer own clothes? Grow your own food? Build your own house? Make your own medicines? No? Then shut the hell up.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! You don't know many "regular Joes", do you? Most people don't have the time or energy to devote to learning to program. And by the time the average non-inclined person gets good, they've long since given up and paid money to some company that made a product that does what they needed and have left Linux and the FOSS comunity behind and haven't looked back.
But I fear for society in a world where people refuse to learn because they don't want to, instead of can't.
People don't learn specialized (and to them esoteric) skills because they DON'T HAVE THE TIME! Most people have lives. They have things to do. Kids to feed. Jobs. Houses to keep in order. Lawns that need to be mowed. Friends. Relatives. Etc... It's not that people won't learn (well, the current state of the educational system does make it harder to learn new things, but I digress), it's that they have things they'd rather be doing instead of mastering a specialized set of skills to add some functionality to someone else's unfinshed work.
Have you taken the time to learn how to fix every problem you might have with your car? I'm willing to bet money you know the absolute basics, at best. You can put fuel in it, check the radiator, fill the tires, change a flat, you might know how to check your fluid levels and maybe refill anything that's low. But can you rebuild the transmission? Fix the breaks? Probably not.
Is it because you are lazy? No. It's because you have better things to do with your time. Please, for the love of Pete, stop thinking that everyone should have the same interests as you. That's the attitude that's kept Linux off of most desktops for the last 12 years.
Agreed. Most users are NOT programmers and wouldn't know a function if it bit them on the ass. This whole "do it yourself" mantra is just justification for things not being finished. I have used so many "0.9x" versions of software on Linux that never get to 1.0 it makes me sick. Is it too much to ask that a developement team actually finish a release before sending it out in a non-dev package? Or is it assumed that everything Linux is a developer release? If that's the case Linux is doomed as the vast majority of users don't want to program, don't give a damn about programming and wouldn't be good at it in the first place.
After years of being sick of Windows and repeatedly trying to get into Linux I finally bailed last year and bought a Mac.
Here, educate yourself.
And what about using it as a USB drive? Or they want to use Apple Lossless format?
And why does everyone assume that if you have more than X gigabytes of music you must have stolen it all? I have 17GB in my iTunes library out of 21GB of potential (if I hadn't deleted the songs I didn't like) music. Where did this all come from? 95% from CDs I own that are sitting in my living room (minus the odd CD that only had one song I liked on it and sold to the used CD store). Of the rest most have come from either iTunes Music Store, EMusic.Com and a few from artists websites. How the hell could I have done this? Easy. I've been buying CDs since 1987.
I find the knee-jerk assumption that large storage automatically means theft offensive. Take your "you must be a thief to want this" attitude and ram it up your ass.
The only thing I really remember about the GUS was all of the flamewares between GUS users and SoundBlaster users in the comp.sys.ibm.hardware.soundcards (or very much like that) Usenet newsgroup. It was a pathetic screaming match between entrenched camps of brand-obsessive nerds.
Sadly, while that particular skirmish is long dead, the endless tribal nerdfights continue to this day.
PS: It's "jibs" with a soft "g", you heaven bastards!
I like any alternatve to The Gimp. The Gimp has the worst interface I've seen in a graphics application I've seen since the horror days of DOS-based apps. and many of them were easier to use than The Gimp. The Gimp isn't bad for what you pay for it, but even though it's available for my Mac I still chose to spend money on Photoshop because I can at leats get things done in Photoshop. I don't have the time or energy to try and figure out what the hell The Gimp wants me to do in order to get it to do common tasks. I want to spend my time getting things done.
Someone who takes a Star Wars inspired username has no room to claim what is and what is not science fiction.
You don't like Joss Whedon. We got that with your last post.
So, you have a problem with lesbians? When Willow turned lesbian it was a risky move, not the instant ratings builder it is now. And I never felt like they exploited the relationship for ratings. Hell, Willow only actually kissed Tera on screen in the episode where Tera gets killed. They spent most of the time with Willow and Tera exploring the problems people go through in relationships.
As for Cowboy Bebop, I can't say. I don't like Cowboy Bebop.
Best 10 movies of all time? Hardly. There are tons of better movies, non of them science fiction, that would rank in the top 10. Better than Bladerunner? Depends on what you like. I can see how some people would like it better than Bladerunner. I think Bladerunner is a better film, and will have a greater impact that Serenity will, I can see how some people wouldn't like it. Better than Dune? Hell yes. Dune is an impressive attempt to tuen an overrated book into a movie, but it's not a great movie.
The reason they bother is that you can't enter neutured dogs in certain AKA dog shows. Neuticles need to look and feel real to fool the judges. I have friends that are dog show junkies and they hate the Neuticles guys with a passion.
That's odd. I saw Serenity last weekend with friends who had never seen Firefly and they had not trouble keeping up with what was going on. Yes, they lost some of the richness of the story, but they did a fine job of filling in the blanks for most reasonably observant people.
I fail to see the problem. Our language, hell, our entire brains, are built around giving labels to things and catagorizing them. I fail to see what is so bad about breaking things down and seeing what makes them tick. Unless you are one of those "knowledge kills the mystery" folks. Knowing how something works does not lessen my enjoyment of it. Matter of fact it helps me enjoy it more. I get to see into the creative process of the creator of said artwork and that's pretty cool.
I bet you hate knowing how special effects are done in movies.
This is the funniest thing I've read all day. Thanks!
MS is NOT in a powerless situation. They simply don't want to pay that much money and are taking their ball and going home. We ar seeing a fight between two of the four greediest entities on Earth (the other two being Big Oil and the Pharmacutical (sp?) industies). Nothing more. They will return to the bargaining table soon enough.
I'm not jumping your ass. I'm just venting my frustration that so many people (some of them even post here) beleive that there is some grand mystery to the Pyramids. Like the shape has some magical property or that they were influenced by aliens. People assume that people could not have been smart enough to build them, which is a laughable idea when you look at the things we build today.
And you are right, the only real "mystery" is the exact methods they used to move the blocks. But there is no doubt that human beings did actually move those blocks.
Not to hijak the thread too much, but what "mystery of the pyramids"? People built the largest stone structures they could using the most stable shape they could find. Where's the mystery? And it's not even like they got them right the first time. They had at least one pyramid colapse because the angle was too steep, hence the resulting "bent pyramid" where they changed angles half-way up. And they started with a much simpler design of a series of stepped platforms on top of each other. It's not that hard to think that an engineer looked at that and thought "Hey! I bet we could add sloped sides to that and it would look really cool!" and acted on it.
The only "mystery" is people being unwilling to understand the sheer number of men it took to build them. No one questions how the Great Wall of China was built, and it is a much more impressive engineering feat than the pyramids.
When was the last time you heard about someone taking potshots at the Shuttle? Or any space vehicle? .... .... .... ... I didn't think so.
Why haven't your heard of these events? Because these facilities invest in serious security. You can't get within shooting distance of Cape Kennedey to save your life without getting shot by a guard.
Do you think they're going to build the space elevator in some Kansas cornfield? Not on your life. They are going to build it on a military base in the desert or on some remote island in order to calm people's concerns about falling cables should something snap. And they are going to put some serious security around this thing.
I'm sick and tired of all you scared little Nancies squealing that we should't build Amazing Object X because terrorists are going to attack it. Grow some freaking balls. We can't spend the rest of our lives with our heads burried in the sand because the terrorists might attack something.
Is it any faster? Will it stop bringing my Dual G5 Powermac to its knees? Is it any less of a memory pig?
Typical F/OSS vulturistic BS. Is that all you people care about? People giving you their source code so you can pillage it for your projects?
Here's an idea: write your own damned code!
I've been doing Customer Support for various sized organizations through the releases of Office 97, Office 2000, Office XP (2002) and Office 2003, and every time there is a new release there are documents that break. Excel spreadsheets and Access databases (hahahahaha!) are the worst offenders, breaking with almost every release. A lot of employee time gets eaten up fixing these corrupted files every cycle. Does MS reimburse us for the time wasted? Nope. We PAY Microsoft for the priviledge of dealing with broken documents.
Moving to an open document format would stop most of this from happenning. It would also remove the only barrier keeping WordPerfect, or the Mac or Linux, out of the office environment: document interchange.