Heck, even Intel, whom Microsoft laudes as a partner in embracing Vista has publicly stated that they, as a corporation, will not even install Vista on their computers until after SP1 is released...
Intel has been around longer than Micro$loth. Intel has been truly technologically innovative at several times --- something Micro$loth has never really accomplished often. M$ is desperate to have its buggy bloatware bundled on all new x86/x64 platforms from major vendors, and has been trying hard to distance itself from specific hardware platforms via MSIL produced by its latest compilers such as VB and C#. All Intel/AMD need to due to put a major hurt on M$ is to release a new CPU spec that offers significant performance/feature improvements but does not cater to M$'s MSIL scheme. In other words, it is possible to design a CPU/GPU combo that works best when apps deal with it at the bare metal level as opposed to some crappy, contrived M$ level. I wonder if some flavor of Linux will get big enough to cause development of such a non-x86 chip set that is nonetheless capable of emulating x86 processors at reasonable speed.
If Intel/AMD could convince the Dells, HPs/Compaqs, Gateways of the world that they have a free OS & major app solution that does not involve Micro$loth, but produces as good or better real world business results using FOSS, M$ would be SOL. That would be a Good Thing(tm)!
It is easy to design good hardware that M$ buggy bloatware won't work with well, but that supports Linux/Unix extremely well -- just optimize the CPU/GPU in a way that.NET was never designed for. M$ would take another decade to catch/buy up the tech it needed to stay competitive.
Sufficient amounts of ingested caffeine can make everything seem faster! I like experiements which require one to consume an entire can of coffee in order to cut slots it in to do psudo-physics research.:-)
Better than Micro$loth's Monopoly(tm) where we pay ever increasing prices for buggy bloatware.
The way to beat the MS Monopoly(tm) is to let the people have real choices and not have MS Crap(tm) shoved down their throats from the moment they buy a new computer at a big box store (Worst Buy, Corrupt City, Office Last, etc.) or have to deal with government forms, to the point where they need to deal with computer security/privacy issues. Microsoft is amazingly lame at building safe software. But most consumers don't realize there are alternatives to the crapware M$ foists upon them.
Ideally, a consumer should buy a new computer and have several choices as to which OS(es) will run on it, many of them being non-M$ OSes (read: various flavors of Linux, even a reborn OS/2, Solaris, or perhaps a newer, even better OpenVMS). For documents, the standard should be completely non-proprietary. The specs should be simple and brief, not 6000+ pages of M$ dreck.
They usually ask for your SSN (Social inSecurity Number) at the time you apply for a job. If you don't provide it, you probably aren't even considered for any position with their organization.
What would be nice is a strict privacy law that prevents SSNs for being used for anything other than communications with the IRS. Credit bureaus, banks, potential (not actual) employers, would be liable for a large penalty under such a law for even asking about your SSN unless they have already hired you or generated taxable income for you. Ideally, there would be a FairTax, not an income tax, and latter point would be moot -- SSNs would be irrelevant and you could (legally) fill in any 9-decimal-digit number where a form requests/demands an SSN and nobody could object to the figure you provide on legal grounds -- to do so would be unfair discrimination. The idea there is to make the government turn against itself, with the equal opportunity folks battling the revenuers, leaving the rest of us citizens to quietly enjoy our lives without annoying intrusions by Big Brother and Big Corp.
Yeah, well, not all of us were able to get into Costco law school like you and your elite friends.
Stop whining. You obviously saved up enough box tops and gum wrappers to get your certificate.
If smart people liked living in urban jungles and living like rats in warrens, mass transit would not require massive subsidies at the taxpayers' expense in most places -- it would pay for it self and would attract private sector investors. Smart, successful people don't take the bus or commuter train if they can avoid doing so. Living situations that require mass transit are inefficient wastes of time. I certainly wouldn't want to depend on a city bus to take my kid anywhere on short notice, but driving my car works quite well almost any place I've ever lived.
People who oppose so-called "sprawl" are in denial -- they can't afford to live better lifestyles and want to drag others down to their level.
I also sold my car (partly so I could afford to live down there).
Was your castration physical, or chemical? Do you really enjoy slaving away for your liberaloon masters such as Hillary Clinton, Barack Osama^H^H^H^Hbama, and other manipulative, pro-big-government "leaders" who enjoy life in the ritzy parts of sprawling cities because you are willing to make personal sacrifices at their (hypocritical) lifestyle altars? What's it like living in the warren? Do you feel more or less sympathetic toward sheep, lemmings, and mindless herd animals in general?
So-called "smart-growth" is for dumb animals. Real people live the best way they know how and can afford to, regardless of what is trendy, politically correct, or government approved. In the U.S., that usually involves owning a car and driving it often.
Given the security-lax, bug-ridden nature of nearly all major Microsoft software products, it would be wise to avoid shopping at Wally-World if you want to avoid having your credit card triple or quadruple billed, don't want MS phoning home with your bank account information snagged from your PC, and do want to enjoy your privacy.
When Wal-Mart and Microsoft gang up on the consumer, one should be VERY AFRAID!
I don't know if all the US is like this, but every spawling area that I've been to in the US is insanely pedestrian unfriendly.
Let's face it. Kids should walk to school, under most circumstances. But they don't. Most of them are hauled off to the obligatory public school, which may not be nearby due to mandatory bussing for Political Correctness' sake. Then they are hauled back home again (and maybe alone) by the same functionally illiterate bus drivers who (effectively) work for the public school system that is making the kids stupid. Only retards would ride or want their kids to ride one of those annoying yellow school buses. Walking is very good, but being chauffered to/from school in a flash car is *MUCH* more fun. School buses suck. 'Nuf said!
Oh, yeah, what was this thread about before I tried to divert it for entertainment?
So what you would want is a machine where you choose what is going in it? Similar to the muscle car industry putting supercharged hemi's in cars without proper handling?
It just so happens I've been known to race cars now and then. You won't find me on a drag strip or an oval track...both are boring as far as I am concerned. Autocross, rally, and road racing are more my style. But, I'll point out that even when people did have plenty of true muscle cars to choose from at very reasonable prices in the U.S., most chose fairly practical, mundane vehicles. That is why manual transmissions are so uncommon these days.
Most people buy cars to get them around town and take on an occasional vacation or business trip, and they have little interest in performance features (unlike luxury options). A lot of what they pay for is perceived image. Think about how few SUV or 4WD pickup truck owners actually do any off-roading of any consequence. Judging by the number of those vehicles I see all shiny as they plod down the streets around town, or somehow manage to get stuck in a little snow, I'm sure most people who drive them have not a clue as to what they are actually capable of. But hey, at least they aren't as silly as a Bentley or most hybrid vehicles.:-)
It is good when consumers have lots of things in a category to choose from. That's what makes the marketplace work efficiently. It also makes discriminating consumers happier because they can probably get closer to their ideal product in a given category. Look at all the myriad choices people have in wired phone, cell phone and mp3 player technology these days. Are you old enough to recall when the original AT&T (Ma Bell) controlled the telecom industry with an iron fist? Sadly, that day may be returning, given recent mergers.
VAX VMS and to a far lesser degree, even PC/MS-DOS had more natural, English-like command sets than any flavor of *nix I've encountered does at the command prompt. A lot of the *nix command set is almost as bad as greek... Many *nix man pages are so cryptic as to be useless. I like having a help tree at the command prompt, something VMS did really well. I became a VAX sysadmin within 4 months of first using a VAX. I'd been using *nix systems for half a decade and still found the command set to be arcane.
Like it or not, for Linux to really become competitive with Winblows, it will have to be intuitive enough for your grandmother to use to keep her Xmas card list on and exchange email with her grandkids. If she can just pop in a CD or DVD and have it play without much fuss on a *nix system right out of the box, that is a Big Win.
Most people do not want to have to compile and install their favorite apps tarballs or.gz files containing source code. (Think about it: WTF does "tarball" mean to Joe Average Computer User? I bet a lot of Linux geeks don't know where the term "tar" in this context originated. How many reading this know it stems from "Tape ARchive"?) Most folks just want to download programs or shove in a disc and have a Window pop up that guides them through the installation process. MS finally got Plug&Pray to work well enough that I don't hear much griping from clients about it. Ditto for most Winblows updates, except for all the rebooting they require. Ubuntu is my Linux distro of choice, because I don't have to waste as much time fiddling with configuration details I'd rather not fuss with. I can do everything I want to do with a PC running Ubuntu except run certain software that runs only on Winblows/Mac platforms, and that is mostly games such as WoW.
Yeah like Linux doesnt have bug fixes to its kernel. Face it even linux has bugs and the more popular it gets the more bugs are being found.
True and true. But many versions of *nix don't require a reboot after all but the most trivial updates. Unix (and to a slightly lesser degree, Linux) was originally designed by computer scientists and ostensibly, originally for use by geeks. Windows is a many-fold kludge as an operating system, and it shows.
Also just because you dont have problems with linux doesnt mean other people dont either. Also Mcirosoft would be much better if they didnt get sued from people. Also want to know soemthing? If windows goes down microsoft would just create a windows based off of linux sort of what apple did.
I have a buttload of problems with Linux, even a friendly flavor such as Ubuntu. It is *NOT* intuitive. Just try to do anything at the CLI level. That is arguably the worst flaw of *nix OSes -- they utilize cryptic commands to accomplish routine tasks. Mind you, I am very aware of the distinction between the Linux kernel and the various distros based upon it. Ubuntu works for me, mostly because there are enough other folks using it who desperately want to avoid MS Buggy Bloatware(tm) that a serious Ubuntu user community support group has sprung up. Ubuntu has a 64-bit edition, which is sort of a must for me as I enjoy programming down to the bare silicon occasionally.
I am rambling.:-( Here is the main point: It would not require any kind of technological breakthrough to make Ubuntu, Fedora, or any other major flavor of Linux as friendly as WinXP, without all the horrific design flaws inherent in every release of MS Winblows. Winblows would have to be redesigned and rewritten from the ground up to be as stable, secure and tight as most of the better Linux distros are. If IBM had stuck with OS/2, we might have a Windows-like OS we could count on, but MS used its monopoly power to great effect, even when the victim was a company the size of IBM.
Vista doesn't have issues. It *IS* an issue to anyone who cares about secure, reliable, affordable computing. I've been telling clients to avoid it like the plague that it is. The main problem with the plague known as MS Vista is that it is spread by the carriers known as computer manufacturers.
One way the plague might be stopped is for the US and EU to re-open their anti-trust cases against Micro$oft with a minimum goal of having any system where an MS OS comes pre-infec^H^H^Hstalled boot up the first time to a screen that gives the customer a choice of alternative non-MS (FOSS) operating systems. Since none of the major vendors, Dell, HP/Compaq, Gateway, Toshiba, Sony, Lenovo, etc. provide much in the way of technical support unless a customer pays them outrageous prices, they really wouldn't have anything to lose by pre-installing one or more flavors of Linux or Unix on the new boxes they distribute via the major chain stores.
My point is that the typical PC buyer has little choice but to pay for and try to figure out how to deal with the Microsoft crapware that comes on almost all new systems. I suspect that many computer vendors would welcome an opportunity to stop wasting money on lame MS products and distribute FOSS equivalents. The neat thing is that MS has already implemented a system whereby it can charge only those customers who actually decide to use its buggy bloatware instead of one or more of the other OSes and office suites that manufacturers decide to allow the consumer to select from when she first boots a new computer.
I truly wish new systems came bare by default, with consumers getting to choose which operating system(s) and office suite(s) they want to put on them. I fondly recall when systems came with complete sets of installation disks (not discs:-) That would be another great requirement of any settlement the US and EU might reach with M$: if a new system is shipped with an M$ OS as the default, it ought to include a full set of generic Windows install discs, with a license transferable to any other machine the consumer decides to put it on. Making that part of the agreement retroactive, so that current users of Win98, WinME, WinNT, and WinXP could easily obtain installation discs for their old OSes when they decide to upgrade their hardware would annoy MS but impose no significant burden upon it, as long as it could charge a nominal fee to people who want physical install discs instead of DLing ISO images and burning and burning their own. I think a fair price for a set of Winblows install discs could be pegged at what it costs to have a set of install discs for a quality OS such as Ubuntu delivred to one's door.:-)
Basically, in order to end the Microsoft monopoly and stop the spread of Microsoft Buggy Bloatware(tm), the anti-trust regulators need to force the supply chain to change so that costly MS operating system and office suite software is no longer the default. As much as I dislike MS these days, I have little doubt it could deliver a very high-quality OS (far superior to the flashy junkware known as Vista) if it had to compete on an even playing field. This would be especially true if big companies such as Google or Sun could put their own (new) OSes on new systems as options, right alongside the MS product, since all existing contracts MS has with hardware vendors that pre-install its OSes would be nullified as part of any reasonable anti-trust settlement.
The video card was standard in his machine. In other words... it was supplied by Apple. The drivers he is using are from Apple. Nvidia doesn't even offer Mac drivers on their site.
As most people reading/. probably know, today's graphic cards are (specialized) computers in their own right, often very powerful ones. Some of the best have GPUs that run circles around traditional CPUs when it comes to doing certain useful kinds of math.
I really hate to make excuses for Apple, but I'm sure that Apple needs to work closely with and depend upon nVidia to make the latter's video cards function properly in Apple products. Someone else with a voice of some apparent authority has said he is an admin on the forum in question and is not allowed to provide complete information about certain kinds of issues involving Apple comps and nVidia graphic adapters sold as part of the former systems.
Maybe if Apple didn't put all kinds of restrictions on communications with the general public as part of its agreement with nVidia, issues such as the one that is the topic of the original article would be resolved more quickly and generate less ill-will toward Apple from the tech-savvy community. I note that nVidia doesn't share Apple's terrible reputation for hiding problems.
After waiting months for a resolution to this, I decided to post on Apple's support site. Here is an image of my post.. Within a few hours, they removed it from the site, placing it under 'Posts Removed by Administration.' What's going on here? Is Apple trying to hide this bug, or is there something more serious going on between Apple and NVidia?"
Clearly you are a well-informed, technically savvy person. It seems obvious that the question you posted to Apple's support site posed a major threat the the stability of Steve Job's Reality Distortion Field, so Apple simply removed the immediate threat to their image. You might want to be careful, lest they decide to remove the source of the threat...you haven't seen any unfamiliar non-descript vehicles parked outside your home recently, have you?
"iPod: you can get better, but you can't pay more." is a favorite saying of mine. It has applied to most oh-so-trendy Apple products since the late 80s. As someone who has supported Macs as part of my job in the past, beginning right about the time the Web did, I learned to not bother with official Apple forums and instead turn to the Mac user community sites.
Apple wants to maintain the carefully crafted illusion that Macs are trouble-free, never get infected by malware, and are easy to use even for computer illiterates. Only the last item has an element of truth to it. Macs are reasonably easy to use, for computer illiteres who don't want to actually do much with their computer. Businesspeople who continued to use Macs for various kinds of publishing work when Wintel was clearly the way to go for most purposes quickly discovered that Macs are at least as trouble-prone as PCs and since Apple is often slow to fix bugs and the Mac userbase has always been tiny compared to that of Wintel systems, there aren't as many other places to turn to for help, serious Mac problems often go unresolved for much longer than similar ones do on common Wintel platforms.
The Mac user community has long been fairly close knit and tries to be helpful, in my experience. It tends to lack the sheer numbers of folks with excellent technical skills that the Wintel user community has (due to sheer size) and the Linux crowd enjoys (because Linux users tend(ed) to be geeks by nature, at least until recently as more "user friendly" versions of Linux have appeared.
My bet is that Apple will feel the heat now that you've exposed the way they disappeared your technical question from their support forum and will probably claim that you failed to follow procedure or that someone removed it accidentally. I'd be somewhat amazed if you get a timely, useful reply to your query from Apple. If you do, please post it as a follow-up. Actually, any further responses you get from Apple would be interesting.
I'm more curious as to what nVidia will do now that this issue has been made very public. Right now I'm trying to figure out how to get Ubuntu 6.10 to recognize the nVidia GeForce 7600 GS I installed along with a Dell 2407 WFP on my main machine. Windows XPx64Pro quickly recognized the new hardware and installed the proper drivers for it. Edgy Eft will only boot into CLI mode, complaining that it can't start the X server won't start, probably due to it not being set up correctly. If Linux vendors can come up with an effective Plug&Pray system like Microsoft has (finally, after several years of very gradual improvement), they'll be winning over a lot of people who might otherwise be suck(er)ed into the quagmire known as Vista.
It will be interesting to see which of us obtains a solution first.
Why not just follow the U.S. government's lead and Don't Ask where your downloaded music comes from, and Don't Tell anyone how you got it? If the concept works for the U.S. Armed Forces, it should work for you. If the government can assume that everyone who enlists is straight, why shouldn't you assume that all music you find on the Internet is free?
Seriously. I went through a phase where I bought a bunch of rechargeable AAA, AA, C, D and 9V batteries, along with some chargers.
I have since realized that I can do without most battery operated devices that take standard external rechargeable batteries. I'm thinking hard about the batteries I do recharge often, and they are in my: laptop computer, electric razor, power bit driver, automobile, and cellular phone. Hmmm.
"Many of the companies mentioned in the Los Angeles Times articles, such as Ford, Kraft, Fannie Mae, Nestle, and General Electric, do a lot of work that some people like, as well as work that some people do not like. Some activities might even be viewed positively by some people and negatively by others."
In yet another burst of MS-style innovation, it seems the Gates Foundation has come up with a question that nobody has ever asked before!: "Can you please everybody, all of the time?" This is a very significant matter, extremely worthy of research sponsorship by the Gates Foundation. Apparantly nobody has looked into it, much less tried to resolve it. Because I am such a devoted scholar, supporter of not-for-profit organizations (that's "charities" in the minds of the Little People who keep Microsoft oh-so-profitable), I am willing to devote my time and energy into investigating the nature and consequences of this profound puzzle that has such global implications
and is clearly of great importance to all of Mankind.
I think that with a modest research grant, say about equivalent to what was spent to develop Vista, I can make significant progress in defining, exploring, and perhaps coming up with plans of action to address this thorny issue.
Lesson learned to all: if you're going to claim you're a nonprofit organization, BE A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION.
Guess what? Big Brother dislikes non-for-profit organizations because they interfere with taxing us to the max. It makes them jump though lots of hoops to establish themselves as such. Why not assume all organizations that accept donations from a wide, seemly unrelated set of donors are not-for-profit by default? Why not just scrap income taxes entirely? That would be too sensible...
From what I understand, the banks that issue various forms of plastic are getting more savvy about 'Net payment methods and are trying to compete with eBay/PayPal...but the latter firms got the jump when the eGold-type firms ran into a regulatory quagmire. I could be very wrong about that. All I do knows is that I used to use eBay and now warn people to stay far away from it and PayPal (which I am not gullible enough to have ever considered using).
Reputable, honest firms offer far better options for customers/clients to contact them than eBay/PayPal does. The slain soldier's family are a good example of how callous those outfits can be to "little people". On thing that saddens me is the way a large, mostly decent corporation, Google, has become dependent on the likes of eBay. At least Google has tried to compete with PayPal.
Compared to what we as a small shop had to pay to our credit card processing company (who was the cheapest available when the contract was signed) PayPal's rates are very reasonable.
Let me guess... You signed your contract with PayPal before it was part of eBay? And you have never sought a better alternative? PayPal is as predatory as the "pay day", "tax refund", and "auto title" loan outfits. Can you say "unethical"? Both eBay and now PayPal are milking suckers for every penny they can snag.
I know where to find deals, but does Joe and Jill Sixpack?
Fair enough. I tried http://www.onsale.com/ after searching with Google for "online auction consumer electronics". Not a bad site. I've shopped there in the past. Your point is valid. Most people do not have a clue as to how to pose a query to a search engine. PayPal/eBay get into financially raping such innocent people.
I'm surprised that no exec with a clue at PayPal didn't realize the horrible publicity they would obtain by ripping off the family of a slain soldier.:-( Most suits know more about PR and especially damage control.
"Paypal Doesn't Want Slain Soldiers' Families To Receive Aid"
PayPal is EVIL. It went from being merely obnoxiusly intrusive and officious to being downright EVIL when it was bought out by eBay. Both companies are all about greed and neither give a shit about fucking over their userbase. The problem with eBay is that Jane Average doesn't realize that there are better auction sites for anything more significant than "collectibles". If you are into books, music, tools, videos, firearms, art, high-fashion, etc. there are plenty of better online marketplaces that won't rip you off the way eBay tends to do. Just do a Google search on "online auction" + a keyword or three related to what you want to buy or sell.
PayPal is particularly pernicious. Most people don't realize that PayPal charges a small fortune for nothing more than a little convenience...and it isn't terribly convenient when one gets ripped off by eBay the way the family of this slain soldier are.
Remember, friends don't let friends use PayPal. It is anything but your pal!
An older Windows release, reasonably patched,
running under Linux (win4lin) and behind a paranoid
firewall is safer than XP or Vista.
I think Win2K was arguably the most secure OS Micro$oft ever released, once they got to SP4, anyway. The only problem is that many new apps won't run on anything older than XP. The 9x/ME editions of Windows were not true 32-bit OSes and were notoriously unstable. Earlier versions of Windows, 1.x, 2.x, 3.x (and W4WG), basically sucked. DOS 6.22 was not a bad CLI OS, so of course MS stopped marketing DOS.
Micro$oft is infamous for its very buggy, very overpriced bloatware. Ubuntu Linux is better in every respect except for one: you can't easily buy a machine off the shelf that has it or no OS pre-installed. You pay for Microsoft Buggy Bloatware by default, thanks to the Microsoft Monopoly.
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Heck, even Intel, whom Microsoft laudes as a partner in embracing Vista has publicly stated that they, as a corporation, will not even install Vista on their computers until after SP1 is released...
.NET was never designed for. M$ would take another decade to catch/buy up the tech it needed to stay competitive.
Intel has been around longer than Micro$loth. Intel has been truly technologically innovative at several times --- something Micro$loth has never really accomplished often. M$ is desperate to have its buggy bloatware bundled on all new x86/x64 platforms from major vendors, and has been trying hard to distance itself from specific hardware platforms via MSIL produced by its latest compilers such as VB and C#. All Intel/AMD need to due to put a major hurt on M$ is to release a new CPU spec that offers significant performance/feature improvements but does not cater to M$'s MSIL scheme. In other words, it is possible to design a CPU/GPU combo that works best when apps deal with it at the bare metal level as opposed to some crappy, contrived M$ level. I wonder if some flavor of Linux will get big enough to cause development of such a non-x86 chip set that is nonetheless capable of emulating x86 processors at reasonable speed.
If Intel/AMD could convince the Dells, HPs/Compaqs, Gateways of the world that they have a free OS & major app solution that does not involve Micro$loth, but produces as good or better real world business results using FOSS, M$ would be SOL. That would be a Good Thing(tm)!
It is easy to design good hardware that M$ buggy bloatware won't work with well, but that supports Linux/Unix extremely well -- just optimize the CPU/GPU in a way that
A nice example, but what is it supposed to show?
:-)
Sufficient amounts of ingested caffeine can make everything seem faster! I like experiements which require one to consume an entire can of coffee in order to cut slots it in to do psudo-physics research.
...Government mandated mediocrity.
Better than Micro$loth's Monopoly(tm) where we pay ever increasing prices for buggy bloatware.
The way to beat the MS Monopoly(tm) is to let the people have real choices and not have MS Crap(tm) shoved down their throats from the moment they buy a new computer at a big box store (Worst Buy, Corrupt City, Office Last, etc.) or have to deal with government forms, to the point where they need to deal with computer security/privacy issues. Microsoft is amazingly lame at building safe software. But most consumers don't realize there are alternatives to the crapware M$ foists upon them.
Ideally, a consumer should buy a new computer and have several choices as to which OS(es) will run on it, many of them being non-M$ OSes (read: various flavors of Linux, even a reborn OS/2, Solaris, or perhaps a newer, even better OpenVMS). For documents, the standard should be completely non-proprietary. The specs should be simple and brief, not 6000+ pages of M$ dreck.
They usually ask for your SSN (Social inSecurity Number) at the time you apply for a job. If you don't provide it, you probably aren't even considered for any position with their organization.
What would be nice is a strict privacy law that prevents SSNs for being used for anything other than communications with the IRS. Credit bureaus, banks, potential (not actual) employers, would be liable for a large penalty under such a law for even asking about your SSN unless they have already hired you or generated taxable income for you. Ideally, there would be a FairTax, not an income tax, and latter point would be moot -- SSNs would be irrelevant and you could (legally) fill in any 9-decimal-digit number where a form requests/demands an SSN and nobody could object to the figure you provide on legal grounds -- to do so would be unfair discrimination. The idea there is to make the government turn against itself, with the equal opportunity folks battling the revenuers, leaving the rest of us citizens to quietly enjoy our lives without annoying intrusions by Big Brother and Big Corp.
Yeah, well, not all of us were able to get into Costco law school like you and your elite friends.
Stop whining. You obviously saved up enough box tops and gum wrappers to get your certificate.
If smart people liked living in urban jungles and living like rats in warrens, mass transit would not require massive subsidies at the taxpayers' expense in most places -- it would pay for it self and would attract private sector investors. Smart, successful people don't take the bus or commuter train if they can avoid doing so. Living situations that require mass transit are inefficient wastes of time. I certainly wouldn't want to depend on a city bus to take my kid anywhere on short notice, but driving my car works quite well almost any place I've ever lived.
People who oppose so-called "sprawl" are in denial -- they can't afford to live better lifestyles and want to drag others down to their level.
London is one of the only cities I've spent time in that I think does not require one to have a car.
I also sold my car (partly so I could afford to live down there).
Was your castration physical, or chemical? Do you really enjoy slaving away for your liberaloon masters such as Hillary Clinton, Barack Osama^H^H^H^Hbama, and other manipulative, pro-big-government "leaders" who enjoy life in the ritzy parts of sprawling cities because you are willing to make personal sacrifices at their (hypocritical) lifestyle altars? What's it like living in the warren? Do you feel more or less sympathetic toward sheep, lemmings, and mindless herd animals in general?
So-called "smart-growth" is for dumb animals. Real people live the best way they know how and can afford to, regardless of what is trendy, politically correct, or government approved. In the U.S., that usually involves owning a car and driving it often.
Given the security-lax, bug-ridden nature of nearly all major Microsoft software products, it would be wise to avoid shopping at Wally-World if you want to avoid having your credit card triple or quadruple billed, don't want MS phoning home with your bank account information snagged from your PC, and do want to enjoy your privacy.
When Wal-Mart and Microsoft gang up on the consumer, one should be VERY AFRAID!
I don't know if all the US is like this, but every spawling area that I've been to in the US is insanely pedestrian unfriendly.
Let's face it. Kids should walk to school, under most circumstances. But they don't. Most of them are hauled off to the obligatory public school, which may not be nearby due to mandatory bussing for Political Correctness' sake. Then they are hauled back home again (and maybe alone) by the same functionally illiterate bus drivers who (effectively) work for the public school system that is making the kids stupid. Only retards would ride or want their kids to ride one of those annoying yellow school buses. Walking is very good, but being chauffered to/from school in a flash car is *MUCH* more fun. School buses suck. 'Nuf said!
Oh, yeah, what was this thread about before I tried to divert it for entertainment?
So what you would want is a machine where you choose what is going in it? Similar to the muscle car industry putting supercharged hemi's in cars without proper handling?
:-)
It just so happens I've been known to race cars now and then. You won't find me on a drag strip or an oval track...both are boring as far as I am concerned. Autocross, rally, and road racing are more my style. But, I'll point out that even when people did have plenty of true muscle cars to choose from at very reasonable prices in the U.S., most chose fairly practical, mundane vehicles. That is why manual transmissions are so uncommon these days.
Most people buy cars to get them around town and take on an occasional vacation or business trip, and they have little interest in performance features (unlike luxury options). A lot of what they pay for is perceived image. Think about how few SUV or 4WD pickup truck owners actually do any off-roading of any consequence. Judging by the number of those vehicles I see all shiny as they plod down the streets around town, or somehow manage to get stuck in a little snow, I'm sure most people who drive them have not a clue as to what they are actually capable of. But hey, at least they aren't as silly as a Bentley or most hybrid vehicles.
It is good when consumers have lots of things in a category to choose from. That's what makes the marketplace work efficiently. It also makes discriminating consumers happier because they can probably get closer to their ideal product in a given category. Look at all the myriad choices people have in wired phone, cell phone and mp3 player technology these days. Are you old enough to recall when the original AT&T (Ma Bell) controlled the telecom industry with an iron fist? Sadly, that day may be returning, given recent mergers.
VAX VMS and to a far lesser degree, even PC/MS-DOS had more natural, English-like command sets than any flavor of *nix I've encountered does at the command prompt. A lot of the *nix command set is almost as bad as greek... Many *nix man pages are so cryptic as to be useless. I like having a help tree at the command prompt, something VMS did really well. I became a VAX sysadmin within 4 months of first using a VAX. I'd been using *nix systems for half a decade and still found the command set to be arcane.
.gz files containing source code. (Think about it: WTF does "tarball" mean to Joe Average Computer User? I bet a lot of Linux geeks don't know where the term "tar" in this context originated. How many reading this know it stems from "Tape ARchive"?) Most folks just want to download programs or shove in a disc and have a Window pop up that guides them through the installation process. MS finally got Plug&Pray to work well enough that I don't hear much griping from clients about it. Ditto for most Winblows updates, except for all the rebooting they require. Ubuntu is my Linux distro of choice, because I don't have to waste as much time fiddling with configuration details I'd rather not fuss with. I can do everything I want to do with a PC running Ubuntu except run certain software that runs only on Winblows/Mac platforms, and that is mostly games such as WoW.
Like it or not, for Linux to really become competitive with Winblows, it will have to be intuitive enough for your grandmother to use to keep her Xmas card list on and exchange email with her grandkids. If she can just pop in a CD or DVD and have it play without much fuss on a *nix system right out of the box, that is a Big Win.
Most people do not want to have to compile and install their favorite apps tarballs or
Yeah like Linux doesnt have bug fixes to its kernel. Face it even linux has bugs and the more popular it gets the more bugs are being found.
:-( Here is the main point: It would not require any kind of technological breakthrough to make Ubuntu, Fedora, or any other major flavor of Linux as friendly as WinXP, without all the horrific design flaws inherent in every release of MS Winblows. Winblows would have to be redesigned and rewritten from the ground up to be as stable, secure and tight as most of the better Linux distros are. If IBM had stuck with OS/2, we might have a Windows-like OS we could count on, but MS used its monopoly power to great effect, even when the victim was a company the size of IBM.
True and true. But many versions of *nix don't require a reboot after all but the most trivial updates. Unix (and to a slightly lesser degree, Linux) was originally designed by computer scientists and ostensibly, originally for use by geeks. Windows is a many-fold kludge as an operating system, and it shows.
Also just because you dont have problems with linux doesnt mean other people dont either. Also Mcirosoft would be much better if they didnt get sued from people. Also want to know soemthing? If windows goes down microsoft would just create a windows based off of linux sort of what apple did.
I have a buttload of problems with Linux, even a friendly flavor such as Ubuntu. It is *NOT* intuitive. Just try to do anything at the CLI level. That is arguably the worst flaw of *nix OSes -- they utilize cryptic commands to accomplish routine tasks. Mind you, I am very aware of the distinction between the Linux kernel and the various distros based upon it. Ubuntu works for me, mostly because there are enough other folks using it who desperately want to avoid MS Buggy Bloatware(tm) that a serious Ubuntu user community support group has sprung up. Ubuntu has a 64-bit edition, which is sort of a must for me as I enjoy programming down to the bare silicon occasionally.
I am rambling.
Vista doesn't have issues. It *IS* an issue to anyone who cares about secure, reliable, affordable computing. I've been telling clients to avoid it like the plague that it is. The main problem with the plague known as MS Vista is that it is spread by the carriers known as computer manufacturers.
:-) That would be another great requirement of any settlement the US and EU might reach with M$: if a new system is shipped with an M$ OS as the default, it ought to include a full set of generic Windows install discs, with a license transferable to any other machine the consumer decides to put it on. Making that part of the agreement retroactive, so that current users of Win98, WinME, WinNT, and WinXP could easily obtain installation discs for their old OSes when they decide to upgrade their hardware would annoy MS but impose no significant burden upon it, as long as it could charge a nominal fee to people who want physical install discs instead of DLing ISO images and burning and burning their own. I think a fair price for a set of Winblows install discs could be pegged at what it costs to have a set of install discs for a quality OS such as Ubuntu delivred to one's door. :-)
One way the plague might be stopped is for the US and EU to re-open their anti-trust cases against Micro$oft with a minimum goal of having any system where an MS OS comes pre-infec^H^H^Hstalled boot up the first time to a screen that gives the customer a choice of alternative non-MS (FOSS) operating systems. Since none of the major vendors, Dell, HP/Compaq, Gateway, Toshiba, Sony, Lenovo, etc. provide much in the way of technical support unless a customer pays them outrageous prices, they really wouldn't have anything to lose by pre-installing one or more flavors of Linux or Unix on the new boxes they distribute via the major chain stores.
My point is that the typical PC buyer has little choice but to pay for and try to figure out how to deal with the Microsoft crapware that comes on almost all new systems. I suspect that many computer vendors would welcome an opportunity to stop wasting money on lame MS products and distribute FOSS equivalents. The neat thing is that MS has already implemented a system whereby it can charge only those customers who actually decide to use its buggy bloatware instead of one or more of the other OSes and office suites that manufacturers decide to allow the consumer to select from when she first boots a new computer.
I truly wish new systems came bare by default, with consumers getting to choose which operating system(s) and office suite(s) they want to put on them. I fondly recall when systems came with complete sets of installation disks (not discs
Basically, in order to end the Microsoft monopoly and stop the spread of Microsoft Buggy Bloatware(tm), the anti-trust regulators need to force the supply chain to change so that costly MS operating system and office suite software is no longer the default. As much as I dislike MS these days, I have little doubt it could deliver a very high-quality OS (far superior to the flashy junkware known as Vista) if it had to compete on an even playing field. This would be especially true if big companies such as Google or Sun could put their own (new) OSes on new systems as options, right alongside the MS product, since all existing contracts MS has with hardware vendors that pre-install its OSes would be nullified as part of any reasonable anti-trust settlement.
The video card was standard in his machine. In other words... it was supplied by Apple. The drivers he is using are from Apple. Nvidia doesn't even offer Mac drivers on their site.
/. probably know, today's graphic cards are (specialized) computers in their own right, often very powerful ones. Some of the best have GPUs that run circles around traditional CPUs when it comes to doing certain useful kinds of math.
As most people reading
I really hate to make excuses for Apple, but I'm sure that Apple needs to work closely with and depend upon nVidia to make the latter's video cards function properly in Apple products. Someone else with a voice of some apparent authority has said he is an admin on the forum in question and is not allowed to provide complete information about certain kinds of issues involving Apple comps and nVidia graphic adapters sold as part of the former systems.
Maybe if Apple didn't put all kinds of restrictions on communications with the general public as part of its agreement with nVidia, issues such as the one that is the topic of the original article would be resolved more quickly and generate less ill-will toward Apple from the tech-savvy community. I note that nVidia doesn't share Apple's terrible reputation for hiding problems.
After waiting months for a resolution to this, I decided to post on Apple's support site. Here is an image of my post.. Within a few hours, they removed it from the site, placing it under 'Posts Removed by Administration.' What's going on here? Is Apple trying to hide this bug, or is there something more serious going on between Apple and NVidia?"
Clearly you are a well-informed, technically savvy person. It seems obvious that the question you posted to Apple's support site posed a major threat the the stability of Steve Job's Reality Distortion Field, so Apple simply removed the immediate threat to their image. You might want to be careful, lest they decide to remove the source of the threat...you haven't seen any unfamiliar non-descript vehicles parked outside your home recently, have you?
"iPod: you can get better, but you can't pay more." is a favorite saying of mine. It has applied to most oh-so-trendy Apple products since the late 80s. As someone who has supported Macs as part of my job in the past, beginning right about the time the Web did, I learned to not bother with official Apple forums and instead turn to the Mac user community sites.
Apple wants to maintain the carefully crafted illusion that Macs are trouble-free, never get infected by malware, and are easy to use even for computer illiterates. Only the last item has an element of truth to it. Macs are reasonably easy to use, for computer illiteres who don't want to actually do much with their computer. Businesspeople who continued to use Macs for various kinds of publishing work when Wintel was clearly the way to go for most purposes quickly discovered that Macs are at least as trouble-prone as PCs and since Apple is often slow to fix bugs and the Mac userbase has always been tiny compared to that of Wintel systems, there aren't as many other places to turn to for help, serious Mac problems often go unresolved for much longer than similar ones do on common Wintel platforms.
The Mac user community has long been fairly close knit and tries to be helpful, in my experience. It tends to lack the sheer numbers of folks with excellent technical skills that the Wintel user community has (due to sheer size) and the Linux crowd enjoys (because Linux users tend(ed) to be geeks by nature, at least until recently as more "user friendly" versions of Linux have appeared.
My bet is that Apple will feel the heat now that you've exposed the way they disappeared your technical question from their support forum and will probably claim that you failed to follow procedure or that someone removed it accidentally. I'd be somewhat amazed if you get a timely, useful reply to your query from Apple. If you do, please post it as a follow-up. Actually, any further responses you get from Apple would be interesting.
I'm more curious as to what nVidia will do now that this issue has been made very public. Right now I'm trying to figure out how to get Ubuntu 6.10 to recognize the nVidia GeForce 7600 GS I installed along with a Dell 2407 WFP on my main machine. Windows XPx64Pro quickly recognized the new hardware and installed the proper drivers for it. Edgy Eft will only boot into CLI mode, complaining that it can't start the X server won't start, probably due to it not being set up correctly. If Linux vendors can come up with an effective Plug&Pray system like Microsoft has (finally, after several years of very gradual improvement), they'll be winning over a lot of people who might otherwise be suck(er)ed into the quagmire known as Vista.
It will be interesting to see which of us obtains a solution first.
Why not just follow the U.S. government's lead and Don't Ask where your downloaded music comes from, and Don't Tell anyone how you got it? If the concept works for the U.S. Armed Forces, it should work for you. If the government can assume that everyone who enlists is straight, why shouldn't you assume that all music you find on the Internet is free?
Seriously. I went through a phase where I bought a bunch of rechargeable AAA, AA, C, D and 9V batteries, along with some chargers.
I have since realized that I can do without most battery operated devices that take standard external rechargeable batteries. I'm thinking hard about the batteries I do recharge often, and they are in my: laptop computer, electric razor, power bit driver, automobile, and cellular phone. Hmmm.
"Many of the companies mentioned in the Los Angeles Times articles, such as Ford, Kraft, Fannie Mae, Nestle, and General Electric, do a lot of work that some people like, as well as work that some people do not like. Some activities might even be viewed positively by some people and negatively by others."
In yet another burst of MS-style innovation, it seems the Gates Foundation has come up with a question that nobody has ever asked before!: "Can you please everybody, all of the time?" This is a very significant matter, extremely worthy of research sponsorship by the Gates Foundation. Apparantly nobody has looked into it, much less tried to resolve it. Because I am such a devoted scholar, supporter of not-for-profit organizations (that's "charities" in the minds of the Little People who keep Microsoft oh-so-profitable), I am willing to devote my time and energy into investigating the nature and consequences of this profound puzzle that has such global implications and is clearly of great importance to all of Mankind.
I think that with a modest research grant, say about equivalent to what was spent to develop Vista, I can make significant progress in defining, exploring, and perhaps coming up with plans of action to address this thorny issue.
Lesson learned to all: if you're going to claim you're a nonprofit organization, BE A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION.
Guess what? Big Brother dislikes non-for-profit organizations because they interfere with taxing us to the max. It makes them jump though lots of hoops to establish themselves as such. Why not assume all organizations that accept donations from a wide, seemly unrelated set of donors are not-for-profit by default? Why not just scrap income taxes entirely? That would be too sensible...
From what I understand, the banks that issue various forms of plastic are getting more savvy about 'Net payment methods and are trying to compete with eBay/PayPal...but the latter firms got the jump when the eGold-type firms ran into a regulatory quagmire. I could be very wrong about that. All I do knows is that I used to use eBay and now warn people to stay far away from it and PayPal (which I am not gullible enough to have ever considered using).
Reputable, honest firms offer far better options for customers/clients to contact them than eBay/PayPal does. The slain soldier's family are a good example of how callous those outfits can be to "little people". On thing that saddens me is the way a large, mostly decent corporation, Google, has become dependent on the likes of eBay. At least Google has tried to compete with PayPal.
ebay/PayPal...just Say "No!"
Compared to what we as a small shop had to pay to our credit card processing company (who was the cheapest available when the contract was signed) PayPal's rates are very reasonable.
Let me guess... You signed your contract with PayPal before it was part of eBay? And you have never sought a better alternative? PayPal is as predatory as the "pay day", "tax refund", and "auto title" loan outfits. Can you say "unethical"? Both eBay and now PayPal are milking suckers for every penny they can snag.
I know where to find deals, but does Joe and Jill Sixpack?
:-( Most suits know more about PR and especially damage control.
Fair enough. I tried http://www.onsale.com/ after searching with Google for "online auction consumer electronics". Not a bad site. I've shopped there in the past. Your point is valid. Most people do not have a clue as to how to pose a query to a search engine. PayPal/eBay get into financially raping such innocent people.
I'm surprised that no exec with a clue at PayPal didn't realize the horrible publicity they would obtain by ripping off the family of a slain soldier.
"Paypal Doesn't Want Slain Soldiers' Families To Receive Aid"
PayPal is EVIL. It went from being merely obnoxiusly intrusive and officious to being downright EVIL when it was bought out by eBay. Both companies are all about greed and neither give a shit about fucking over their userbase. The problem with eBay is that Jane Average doesn't realize that there are better auction sites for anything more significant than "collectibles". If you are into books, music, tools, videos, firearms, art, high-fashion, etc. there are plenty of better online marketplaces that won't rip you off the way eBay tends to do. Just do a Google search on "online auction" + a keyword or three related to what you want to buy or sell.
PayPal is particularly pernicious. Most people don't realize that PayPal charges a small fortune for nothing more than a little convenience...and it isn't terribly convenient when one gets ripped off by eBay the way the family of this slain soldier are.
Remember, friends don't let friends use PayPal. It is anything but your pal!
Real Computers are not made by Du^Hell or Acer.
An older Windows release, reasonably patched, running under Linux (win4lin) and behind a paranoid firewall is safer than XP or Vista.
I think Win2K was arguably the most secure OS Micro$oft ever released, once they got to SP4, anyway. The only problem is that many new apps won't run on anything older than XP. The 9x/ME editions of Windows were not true 32-bit OSes and were notoriously unstable. Earlier versions of Windows, 1.x, 2.x, 3.x (and W4WG), basically sucked. DOS 6.22 was not a bad CLI OS, so of course MS stopped marketing DOS.
Micro$oft is infamous for its very buggy, very overpriced bloatware. Ubuntu Linux is better in every respect except for one: you can't easily buy a machine off the shelf that has it or no OS pre-installed. You pay for Microsoft Buggy Bloatware by default, thanks to the Microsoft Monopoly.