after their first scan error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives with no such errors
This is easily the most important thing a sysadmin needs to know about hard drives. Much as I love Spinrite, when drives start to fail they continue to fail.
And in the year 2020 we will have over-run ourselves.
Who in their right mind trusts ANYTHING the UN says or supports, let alone uses it on/.?
There are no initiatives anywhere but China regarding population control, and they easily work around theirs.
Consider, the ultimate act of pollution of this planet is to have a child. Harsh? Sure. Fact? Even more sure.
You care about pollution, resource-depletion, and the too-many-rats-in-this-box effects that bring on mass-murderers, etc.? Look to your friendly neighborhood Big C church.
Or did you just want to talk about something much easier to avoid thinking about?
Actually, the world population juggernaut/trend _does_ continue. The current trend in this case is not a precise number of fleshy masses we force onto Mother Earth each day. The current trend is that we can not afford the population we have let alone the population we will have tomorrow, next year, next generation.
My preferred word processor is MS Word for DOS, version 5.0 and yes it fits on a floppy (with spell, thesaurus, macros, printer drivers).
- One of the first DOS programs to support the Windows clipboard (until XP broke that)
- A keyboard interface so intuitive that a keyboard template or macro-to-do-this-easier was never necessary
- RTF, both ways
- OS/2 family ap.
- More than good enough Spellcheck and Thesaurus...17 years ago.
I've had Office 2000 Premium since 2000 (due to that sweet $100 offer) but use Word 2000 for only one thing -- converting documents mailed to me that I have to re-email out or otherwise use.
The cost of the OS is now more than the computer it runs on
In the next version, Windows Promisedland will cost $500 to $1,000, occasionally let you enter keystrokes and seldom commit what you type to disk. Attempting to open any file not created by a Microsoft program will bring up a warning dialog at first, after that it will simply delete the file. Typing in "Google" or "Yahoo" in any GoTo or Help dialog will result in a warmboot. It is also rumored to have a tubular pink appendage that you have to apply human saliva and suction to in order to authenticate yourself.
Back when Lance was trying for his 7th in a row we (or I) decided to upgrade us digital (for the OL channel that has since moved to the lower 71, lol).
Imagine our surprise when several upper channels never resolved their display despite their promise to do so. The next day it was different channels with the same attitude. And the problem had legs.
I called a techie. They came out and confirmed there was interference and said I should shorten coax cable runs (that had worked fine before digital with the new 27" TV). They did their usual make-him-a-better-cable and I figured we were all better.
The same channel problems returned and grew worse.
After a few months of this (and right when the HBO channels were going to start costing extra) I called and cancelled the whole thing back to analog. What a relief!
It turned out there were other cable issues which a future techie fixed by redoing all the coax connectors but we are more than happy with our rarely pixelated analog channels. [There was too much eff-wording and not enough effn on the HBO channels anyway]
My point? Our analog TVs handled the crap signal quality many times better than digital. Two of three TVs never showed image problems while the digital setup couldn't display whole channels for days at a time.
Digital is like the radial tire, apparently better performance until you overload the tire and then the performance is dangerously worse. Overloaded bias plys make for fun driving, just ask any 40+ year old teenager.
In addition to the left column being ignored by most if not all of us, it makes it hard in nested mode to see when a new top level post begins (unless there is some other visual cue I missed).
Is there an Opera equivalent.css (and Opera specific syntax) that I can use?
The problem:
Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week. - George Bernard Shaw
Leading to this accepting attitude adjustment:
I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation. - GBS
When you have a totally mature product/market (in this case, operating systems) it is essential that you degrade parts of your product with every new release. Think of it as planned obsolescence for things that never break down.
The first time I saw Microsoft doing this clearly was the media player in Windows 9x. The previous MP was less capable but it worked with the frickin' keyboard. The new one _at first_ would not respond to the keyboard but once you clicked on a menu it would. This took away some automation potential in a nearly invisible way.
The second obviously crippled application is MS Paint. It is crippled in that it never improves. Today's MS Paint is so ridiculously incapable that it can't (1) Ctrl+F display the full image if it is larger than your desktop -- you can scroll it but nothing more, (2) select an image portion that is larger than the Paint window (or at least I haven't found the magic pixie keystrokes), (3) simply scale an image.
Windows ME, of course, had to be slower than Win2000. Even though it wasn't. So, just introduce some useless piece of crapola indexing thing that never stops and voila.
Vista (and the equally dreadful MP v11 for XP) is just the latest careful crippling of an already feature complete product so that, several versions down the road, they can fix these cripplings and introduce new ones at that time.
That Intel processor timeline link tweaked an old nerve...
Does anyone know of any hi-res (i.e. 1600x1200 or higher) images of modern CPUs? Intel used to publish them as centerfolds in their free monthly magazine. I collect such things and have had no luck using Google Images, nor Intel's marketing pages, of late.
Moore's law applied to cpu images should have produced some multi-megabyte beauties by now but instead they seem to have shrunk in size/detail.
I think you are thinking of the super duper potato gun. It is staffed by disgruntled postal workers and fires pieces of rejected McDonald's potatoes using a modified green avenger squirt gun.
Seriously, have we lost the ability to gut check our thoughts? $10,000 for a weapon that has to attain orbit, track to and then merge with a small object, attach itself to said object, then retrofire in the appropriate direction with exactly the right amount of force to return everything to Earth.
Some of those apps are something you would expect to run if you were a website developer who had to make web pages work on IE7 even though it pisses on the American Standard.
FWIW, AC, I think the "Failed to install" screenshot was intended to show poor coding & testing because the dialog title says "Error" while the message says "success".
I do agree with Bob.A above about the image. My sniff test involved looking at the programs shown in Task Manager -- this guy is running everything under the sun (Photoshop, Apache, BT client, WinAmp server, Dreamweaver...and on and on and this screenshot only shows about 25% of the programs running on his system). I think he was deliberately trying to make it croak and probably had 76,000 RAM-intensive windows in IE7.
I'm going to dislike Vista as much as the next geek but there is no sense in lying about its faults.
I enjoy having the CPU usage meter right on the side
In XP I run Task Manager with "Minimize on use" and "Hide when minimized" -- this puts it in the system tray with an icon that shows % utilization -- and I save the 30% cpu loss due to that handy dandy digiclock.
Vertical toolbars blow because they take up many times more screen space that bottom or top ones -- words (in English anyway) have to be displayed horizontally. No getting around it.
I think Vista will be the most hated MS OS yet. In fact I'm off to register www.VistaSucksTheMost.com this instant.
What I am meaning when I say "Old school" is an engine that indexes content and lets the viewer decide what is important. Google no longer does this -- it gives preference to pages ordered in a way it wants, and especially if these (otherwise useless) pages contain links to other pages. The "especially" has become a problem with blogs, IMO.
It is a good point you make that Google has always taken linking into account. It is a bad point that it makes as much sense today as it did initially. DOS fitting in 640K made sense at the time but putting those video pages in the 640K to 1M range was a bad design choice that still haunts us today.
Quite simply, how does a new, useful _but_ not necessarily popular opinion make it to page one of Google today? I don't think it can, yet it must for the web to be a true information leveller. This is the horn of our dilemma. Discuss among yourselves.
I want a search engine like Google was before they bought into blogging and brought that bias into their search results. Search engines that bias results in favor of pages that are heavily linked to end up supporting the status quo over newer-but-better ideas/products/pages, the corporate bullies vs Hertz. This could be a great small business incubator. Does such an engine exist today?
Slashdot Mirror
after their first scan error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives with no such errors
This is easily the most important thing a sysadmin needs to know about hard drives. Much as I love Spinrite, when drives start to fail they continue to fail.
This story reminds me of the run around I got from Dell [India] when my one-and-only-Dell I'm-not-stupid-enough-to buy-their-crap-again started to have seek errors.
And in the year 2020 we will have over-run ourselves.
/.?
Who in their right mind trusts ANYTHING the UN says or supports, let alone uses it on
There are no initiatives anywhere but China regarding population control, and they easily work around theirs.
Consider, the ultimate act of pollution of this planet is to have a child. Harsh? Sure. Fact? Even more sure.
You care about pollution, resource-depletion, and the too-many-rats-in-this-box effects that bring on mass-murderers, etc.? Look to your friendly neighborhood Big C church.
Or did you just want to talk about something much easier to avoid thinking about?
A sickening thought, actually. Reminds me when the Sudbury nickle smelter belched out 2% of the world's SO2.
Actually, the world population juggernaut/trend _does_ continue. The current trend in this case is not a precise number of fleshy masses we force onto Mother Earth each day. The current trend is that we can not afford the population we have let alone the population we will have tomorrow, next year, next generation.
My preferred word processor is MS Word for DOS, version 5.0 and yes it fits on a floppy (with spell, thesaurus, macros, printer drivers).
- One of the first DOS programs to support the Windows clipboard (until XP broke that)
- A keyboard interface so intuitive that a keyboard template or macro-to-do-this-easier was never necessary
- RTF, both ways
- OS/2 family ap.
- More than good enough Spellcheck and Thesaurus...17 years ago.
I've had Office 2000 Premium since 2000 (due to that sweet $100 offer) but use Word 2000 for only one thing -- converting documents mailed to me that I have to re-email out or otherwise use.
The cost of the OS is now more than the computer it runs on
In the next version, Windows Promisedland will cost $500 to $1,000, occasionally let you enter keystrokes and seldom commit what you type to disk. Attempting to open any file not created by a Microsoft program will bring up a warning dialog at first, after that it will simply delete the file. Typing in "Google" or "Yahoo" in any GoTo or Help dialog will result in a warmboot. It is also rumored to have a tubular pink appendage that you have to apply human saliva and suction to in order to authenticate yourself.
Worked perfectly. Much obliged.
Why did parent's clarification/elaboration on his +4 insightful post get 0 flamebaited?
I think I need a vacation...
Back when Lance was trying for his 7th in a row we (or I) decided to upgrade us digital (for the OL channel that has since moved to the lower 71, lol).
Imagine our surprise when several upper channels never resolved their display despite their promise to do so. The next day it was different channels with the same attitude. And the problem had legs.
I called a techie. They came out and confirmed there was interference and said I should shorten coax cable runs (that had worked fine before digital with the new 27" TV). They did their usual make-him-a-better-cable and I figured we were all better.
The same channel problems returned and grew worse.
After a few months of this (and right when the HBO channels were going to start costing extra) I called and cancelled the whole thing back to analog. What a relief!
It turned out there were other cable issues which a future techie fixed by redoing all the coax connectors but we are more than happy with our rarely pixelated analog channels. [There was too much eff-wording and not enough effn on the HBO channels anyway]
My point? Our analog TVs handled the crap signal quality many times better than digital. Two of three TVs never showed image problems while the digital setup couldn't display whole channels for days at a time.
Digital is like the radial tire, apparently better performance until you overload the tire and then the performance is dangerously worse. Overloaded bias plys make for fun driving, just ask any 40+ year old teenager.
In addition to the left column being ignored by most if not all of us, it makes it hard in nested mode to see when a new top level post begins (unless there is some other visual cue I missed).
.css (and Opera specific syntax) that I can use?
Is there an Opera equivalent
The problem:
Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week. - George Bernard Shaw
Leading to this accepting attitude adjustment:
I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation. - GBS
When you have a totally mature product/market (in this case, operating systems) it is essential that you degrade parts of your product with every new release. Think of it as planned obsolescence for things that never break down.
The first time I saw Microsoft doing this clearly was the media player in Windows 9x. The previous MP was less capable but it worked with the frickin' keyboard. The new one _at first_ would not respond to the keyboard but once you clicked on a menu it would. This took away some automation potential in a nearly invisible way.
The second obviously crippled application is MS Paint. It is crippled in that it never improves. Today's MS Paint is so ridiculously incapable that it can't (1) Ctrl+F display the full image if it is larger than your desktop -- you can scroll it but nothing more, (2) select an image portion that is larger than the Paint window (or at least I haven't found the magic pixie keystrokes), (3) simply scale an image.
Windows ME, of course, had to be slower than Win2000. Even though it wasn't. So, just introduce some useless piece of crapola indexing thing that never stops and voila.
Vista (and the equally dreadful MP v11 for XP) is just the latest careful crippling of an already feature complete product so that, several versions down the road, they can fix these cripplings and introduce new ones at that time.
That Intel processor timeline link tweaked an old nerve...
Does anyone know of any hi-res (i.e. 1600x1200 or higher) images of modern CPUs? Intel used to publish them as centerfolds in their free monthly magazine. I collect such things and have had no luck using Google Images, nor Intel's marketing pages, of late.
Moore's law applied to cpu images should have produced some multi-megabyte beauties by now but instead they seem to have shrunk in size/detail.
Detailed AMD cpu pictures would be just as cool.
We just need to worry about debris (at all levels) that gets on a collision course with missions that we care about.
I think about this every time I drive my car.
I think you are thinking of the super duper potato gun. It is staffed by disgruntled postal workers and fires pieces of rejected McDonald's potatoes using a modified green avenger squirt gun.
Seriously, have we lost the ability to gut check our thoughts? $10,000 for a weapon that has to attain orbit, track to and then merge with a small object, attach itself to said object, then retrofire in the appropriate direction with exactly the right amount of force to return everything to Earth.
Insightful? This should be modded catatonic.
My wife just informed me that some perfumes smell like the ocean, including one that was one of her favorites.
/. and have a spouse.
BTW, apologies for posting on
Some of those apps are something you would expect to run if you were a website developer who had to make web pages work on IE7 even though it pisses on the American Standard.
FWIW, AC, I think the "Failed to install" screenshot was intended to show poor coding & testing because the dialog title says "Error" while the message says "success".
I do agree with Bob.A above about the image. My sniff test involved looking at the programs shown in Task Manager -- this guy is running everything under the sun (Photoshop, Apache, BT client, WinAmp server, Dreamweaver...and on and on and this screenshot only shows about 25% of the programs running on his system). I think he was deliberately trying to make it croak and probably had 76,000 RAM-intensive windows in IE7.
I'm going to dislike Vista as much as the next geek but there is no sense in lying about its faults.
Not sure what you mean by screen text "wiggle". Our eyes jitter what we look at so they don't get exhausted holding focus. Did I miss something here?
http://www.google.com
= Google+Search
- 501&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8
Opera: 24,128k
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=testing&btnG
Opera: 24,420k
http://www.yahoo.com
Opera: 33,840k
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=testing&fr=yfp-t
Opera: 33,508k
[Note: this is with a 400K hosts file that tends to filter most ads]
I enjoy having the CPU usage meter right on the side
In XP I run Task Manager with "Minimize on use" and "Hide when minimized" -- this puts it in the system tray with an icon that shows % utilization -- and I save the 30% cpu loss due to that handy dandy digiclock.
Vertical toolbars blow because they take up many times more screen space that bottom or top ones -- words (in English anyway) have to be displayed horizontally. No getting around it.
I think Vista will be the most hated MS OS yet. In fact I'm off to register www.VistaSucksTheMost.com this instant.
In 2003 (the when) Google realized that it and blogs were perfect for each other. But I don't think they are perfect for end users. I think a definitive site on, for example, baby names is more useful than the first ten (or even fifty) hits from Google combined. Compare: 1.5M names vs about 50K names in the first ten links that Google suggests.
What I am meaning when I say "Old school" is an engine that indexes content and lets the viewer decide what is important. Google no longer does this -- it gives preference to pages ordered in a way it wants, and especially if these (otherwise useless) pages contain links to other pages. The "especially" has become a problem with blogs, IMO.
It is a good point you make that Google has always taken linking into account. It is a bad point that it makes as much sense today as it did initially. DOS fitting in 640K made sense at the time but putting those video pages in the 640K to 1M range was a bad design choice that still haunts us today.
Quite simply, how does a new, useful _but_ not necessarily popular opinion make it to page one of Google today? I don't think it can, yet it must for the web to be a true information leveller. This is the horn of our dilemma. Discuss among yourselves.
Thanks for the suggestion. For the curious, it is now called Clusty.
I want a search engine like Google was before they bought into blogging and brought that bias into their search results. Search engines that bias results in favor of pages that are heavily linked to end up supporting the status quo over newer-but-better ideas/products/pages, the corporate bullies vs Hertz. This could be a great small business incubator. Does such an engine exist today?
How does cataloging 3,000 body chemicals equate with decoding a gigabyte sized blueprint/factory for cell manufacture?