I've used Eudora since 1.x and have hundreds of MB archived. I like the plain text mailboxes and have created a script to delete unneeded headers from processed emails so that they take 1/3 the space. If I then open that emailbox again, Eudora recreates the index for it automatically.
Eudora has so many options, accessed through such a refined options interface, combined with INI file advantages that/.ers and power users in general should at least be familiar with it. Outlook is a barbaric yalp by comparison.
Quite right. When I first went to work "in the field" there was a lot of contempt for me simply because I had studied engineering. I found out why as I worked in the real world -- it is extremely difficult to design something on paper that will work perfectly in real life. The biggest lesson I took away from this is don't wildly modify something (it was cars at the time -- putting a bigger motor in a car, even when made by a different manufacture, was done a lot) and expect it to only be better than the original. Odds are it will also be much worse.
Funny about not taking any tools. When I was a maintainer's helper in an isolated camp in the middle of the Rockies (CPRail), I helped the maintainer repair a communication cable with only a 6 inch Crescent and a connector. The segment was spanning the Columbia river and winter snow on a quarter mile of the otherwise super strong "bond strand" cable was too much for it. We pulled the cable up from the river. Pierce tucked it into his belt loop. I boosted him up with my hands, eventually extending them over my head -- he could just reach the crossarm. We looped the cable over the arm and around it to secure it. Spliced the cable and went home.
I think further examination would show engineer wages bunched closer to the average than almost any other profession. Lawyers would probably have the greatest distribution. Although I never practiced as a chemical engineer [BASc, UBC, 1984], switching to computers over 20 years ago, I am proud to be associated with this profession.
As to the trend, I would say that the current economic conditions are pushing companies to push their engineers into new areas. But engineers always do whatever they have to to get the job done. When I did computer stuff at NLK Consultants, it was routine to hand engineers new software tools and watch them go and use them -- no training, no big deal, just part of the job.
It is also worth observing that other than one person's quote, most of the article deals with _skills_ that engineers think are important -- not their actual duties. There were few hard stats about how much more they are doing other than "50% say they are working in more areas than they did a year ago". I think that engineering is less subject to change and management interference than the average business -- something to do with rule #1: make sure the bridge doesn't collapse. Making an article like this bogus by default.
I've played electronic games off and on for 35 years. WoW has zero attraction to me as I am not interested in swinging swords at things. Games I have played for hundreds and even thousands of hours include: well set up physical pinball games, Arkanoid, Tetris, Centipede and now 3D Ultra Pinball Thrillride (3DUPT). My son was playing a free demo of 3DUPT and got me interested. We ended up buying the game online (via Amazon) for something like $6 plus s+h as the game is no longer mainstream apparently.
The pinball "feel" is truly impressive, playing better than a physical pinball game mainly because the flipper contacts never arc and corrode and become flaky. Unlike most PC pinball games that are portrait-style like the arcade versions they emulate, 3DUPT uses the full 4 by 3 ratio screen to great effect. 3 sets of flippers, multi ball, sub-level playing fields -- not innovative in themselves but superbly done parts of a perfect game.
The 3DUPT demo timed out after you earned 2 million points. Eventually we would try to earn that on the first ball. Whoop. My current personal record on the full 3DUPT is 135 billion, with a typical top game lasting 4 to 6 hours, spread over as much time as I like. I have played and paused games for up to 3 days. Another part of the beauty of 3DUPT is I never have to pay-to-play it again -- even burning a CD backup of the game required no hacking tool, a refreshing change.
Part of the ongoing enjoyment of playing 3DUPT is trying to beat my previous high score. At any point the ball can drain and if it drains quickly just a couple of times my chance of breaking the record during that game will be over so I have to stay sharp continuously. The same is true of Arkanoid, Centipede and physical pinball games in general. By the way, this sounds like the opposite of WoW and many/most of the other games mentioned.
I track my scores in other parts of the game -- longest ball duration, largest bonus, etc. -- and my son and I have talked numerous times on ways we would improve the game. I can't imagine playing a game with a cap on it (e.g. a quest that ends predictably for one and all). Pinball never ends and you get out of it what you put in.
So, 3DUPT is a game I'd pay money for. Before I found out I could easily back up the game I even planned to buy several more copies of it as backups. Make more games like this and I will buy them. WoW is for Sci-Fi types, I prefer ESPN. MMOs are for chatter types, I prefer something that can be paused or played entirely on my whim. WoW and most games in general these days are violent and repetitive, I prefer good old hand-eye coordination activities (including real football, soccer, etc).
I am able to cut out unwanted parts of the DivX files my D'zign DV-5 creates, then resave the file and A/V is still synced. But maybe you were implying that DivX format would not be good enough?
By the way, anyone know where to get batteries (or any kind of support/service) for the DV-5? The 'official' web link has email addresses that bounce, etc.
Recumbent bikes are cool and faster than regular bikes because the legs are set up near the chest if you look at it horizontally (the long way) and cut down on wind resistance dramatically even without wind flairs and all that.
Recumbents are awkward bikes, from a balance point of view, because the wheelbase is too long (think chopper vs regular motorcycle), and you do not have good hand leverage to control them. I think they go faster because more power can be delivered to the crank -- I can only apply 170 pounds maximum (my body weight) with an upright bike (i.e. I stand on a pedal). Compare that to 750 to 1,000+ pounds of force (my Universal Gym leg press ability in high school was 750 pounds) when you are "recumbant" _and_ your feet are pushing against something, i.e. the back of your chair/seat. No contest. In addition, while recumbant only your feet move. When upright you have to lift your body up and down to get that 170 pounds of force, otherwise it is even less than this. In short, the recumbant advantage is huge and there should be two separate records IMO.
Windows 98SE (and ME) had extremely few bugs. What they both did have was a deliberate design flaw (system resources that were too small in size) that caused things to crash ugly when you ran more than one heavy resource thing (gee, that would be Outlook, Excel, Word...) at the same time. MS doubled the size of the two System Resource memory areas once (when they moved to Win95) but declined to do it again -- they figured there was more money in leaving 9x/ME crashy and pointing people toward 2000/XP -- a design decision roughly equivalent to continuing to sell the Corvair even after it was declared "unsafe at any speed".
More generally, MS rarely ships buggy software, and when they do they ship patches (at least prior to XP). They make the big bucks in deliberating crippling designs, thus forcing users onward and ever upward.
With NetFlix, the "one DVD a day" turned out to be a bad dream. The reality was more like one every two days. The other big problem was they didn't have every DVD I wanted to watch. Amazon does but it takes a week to get it. A rare-movie-burned-while-I-wait sounds like a niche-filler to me -- bring it on.
What's the use of a high priority screen to spawn task manager if you're still stuck fighting with your broken process?
I load Task Manager on startup, configured to minimize to the system tray. Very handy in diagnosing when things go 100%. Makes it faster to load in a (very rare) emergency as well.
I spent ten minutes scrolling slashdot comments before I found the first "print.html" reference so I feel your pain. However, once I downloaded and saved (yes, I'm a recovering anal retentive) the article and images I noticed it was almost 5MB in size. I imagine Tom's is not too keen on people downloading 5MB of data, only to click away after 30 seconds. But I shall remember to add "print.html" to the end of future Tom's Hardware stories, and for that I am so grateful that I am bequething one of my TRS Model 80s to Anonymous Coward -- could you please contact me at your convenience?
I worked on the Canadian commercial and military Automated Air Traffic Systems (CAATS & MAATS). A co-worker who tested software tracked one particular bug daily to see if it had been fixed yet -- it never was in the year I was there. The major network design problem I inherited and verified was totally denied during my entire stint, but I heard later they switched things to the way that I had advocated. I also heard later that the biggest advocate of the flawed design was married to the top person on the project.
It is quite an unforgettable experience to be the "Junior Barnes" in a room full of high level types working for a 100,000 person corporation who turn on you like a pack of dogs when you state that the design won't work. The most senior person in the room said just one thing, "Why wasn't I told of this earlier?" [I had been invited to this meeting almost on a whim, to help explain something if my boss floundered.]
Anyone remember the PCMag utility "Suggest"? It sent you a not-quite subliminal message of your choosing. They deliberately did not make it unnoticeable but maybe others have tweaked it since then. I still use one of their.com utilities: DR, or DirMagic.
The rule that makes community work is the same rule that makes our lives work: always remember that constructive things work together, destructive things do not. [Note that criticism can be constructive or purely destructive.]
So if we want anything to work, we have to build, not tear down. Pointing out flaws can be ok, if we are not just being mean about it. Trashing a system, then designing a better one is great. Trashing a system, then creating a second, third...nth one in addition (the current Linux model) is not very effective.
So Linux needs a baseline, with upgrades/sidegrades/replacements. It already has an important community, but listening more effectively to it will help with that baseline thingy.
I saw one this morning. Even rewould the tape to watch it again. Car comes racing along, stops, backs up, parallel parks into a spot -- trashing the cars in front and back in the process. I honestly don't remember what was being advertised, but I enjoyed it. Whoa, I was drinking coffee at the time...I think I just got chills.
Many years ago, unimpressed with the MS offering, I checked out reminder programs and settled on xReminder, ultimately registering it for just 20. All major updates to the program have been free, and it is one of my most useful programs today. PKZip deserved and earned my $ back in the DOS days and today PKZip for Windows is good enough for me, mainly because I use the included DOS extension. Spinrite was another highly deserving utility purchase. I'd also give honorable mention to CuteFTP (that revolutionized the interface to FTP, IMHO) and Eudora (that loses points due to too-frequent must-pay-to-get updates).
More recently I have registered DivX (I have a D'zign DV5 DivX-creating digital camera), Acronis' True Image v9 and 3D Ultra Pinball Thrillride;-) (just $5 thru one of Amazon's "aged software" partners) [current high score of ~1x10^^10].
The point is that we are all in this together. We should all buy/support/promote good products. Everything I listed above cost less than a high-end video card -- small potatoes, really, but a definite feel good.
I would also add that we should support good online sites -- two that come to mind are this site (that I have not yet registered with due to lack of perceived value in doing so) and PC Magazine's Utility download deal -- $20 for one year of utilities is not too shabby -- Instaback paid for a year in itself.
I was using Win98SE, and getting tired of the race effect: turn on the computer and try to get whatever you're trying to do done fast before the thing crashes. Then reboot it before trying the next thing.
I thoroughly enjoyed this way of describing Windows 9x's stability. Thanks for setting up my day!
Well, it's not like I could do much with Win98, except trying to navigate around such crash-baiting activities as emptying a recycle bin or renaming a file in explorer.
I never bothered using Explorer (and still hardly ever do, I prefer the DOS prompt) but I did find that renaming a START Menu item and pressing enter caused a crash, whereas clicking OK did not. Love that QA.
For me and those I work with XP has been the way to go. One guy pushes Linux a fair bit but other than that XP, warts and all, has worked best. I think most people prefer a system that works out of the box, with occasional hassle VS a machine that takes tremendous tweaking to work with everything connected to it yet is stable afterward.
After all, consider a car analogy (with apologies to BadAnalogyGuy once again). One of the metrics of car quality is the number of defects the new car ships with. It is a metric because consumers get turned off when things don't fit right, aren't working, or are scratched, etc. Never mind that a trip to the shop for free repairs puts it all right as rain -- the damage is done.
These memory usage comparisons are rarely meaningful. XP can run on as little as a 64MB RAM machine (my mother-in-laws upgraded ME machine) -- it just swaps accordingly. Your "250MB of RAM used to start XP" is almost certainly on a 1GB machine, like mine.
Now if you want to trash XP, trash the swap algorithm -- useful only when turned off.
Several are now 1600x1050 resolution, including the $600 or so Gateway model.
Not sure what you mean by constraints on native resolution. LCDs are designed for a native resolution that they look best at, where the pixels correspond one-to-one with the leds.
As to designers not liking LCDs, that is true for some but not all (from what I've read).
Slashdot Mirror
Eudora has so many options, accessed through such a refined options interface, combined with INI file advantages that /.ers and power users in general should at least be familiar with it. Outlook is a barbaric yalp by comparison.
Quite right. When I first went to work "in the field" there was a lot of contempt for me simply because I had studied engineering. I found out why as I worked in the real world -- it is extremely difficult to design something on paper that will work perfectly in real life. The biggest lesson I took away from this is don't wildly modify something (it was cars at the time -- putting a bigger motor in a car, even when made by a different manufacture, was done a lot) and expect it to only be better than the original. Odds are it will also be much worse.
Funny about not taking any tools. When I was a maintainer's helper in an isolated camp in the middle of the Rockies (CPRail), I helped the maintainer repair a communication cable with only a 6 inch Crescent and a connector. The segment was spanning the Columbia river and winter snow on a quarter mile of the otherwise super strong "bond strand" cable was too much for it. We pulled the cable up from the river. Pierce tucked it into his belt loop. I boosted him up with my hands, eventually extending them over my head -- he could just reach the crossarm. We looped the cable over the arm and around it to secure it. Spliced the cable and went home.
And yes, NLK == Nystrom, Lee, Kobayashi.
I think further examination would show engineer wages bunched closer to the average than almost any other profession. Lawyers would probably have the greatest distribution. Although I never practiced as a chemical engineer [BASc, UBC, 1984], switching to computers over 20 years ago, I am proud to be associated with this profession.
As to the trend, I would say that the current economic conditions are pushing companies to push their engineers into new areas. But engineers always do whatever they have to to get the job done. When I did computer stuff at NLK Consultants, it was routine to hand engineers new software tools and watch them go and use them -- no training, no big deal, just part of the job.
It is also worth observing that other than one person's quote, most of the article deals with _skills_ that engineers think are important -- not their actual duties. There were few hard stats about how much more they are doing other than "50% say they are working in more areas than they did a year ago". I think that engineering is less subject to change and management interference than the average business -- something to do with rule #1: make sure the bridge doesn't collapse. Making an article like this bogus by default.
I've played electronic games off and on for 35 years. WoW has zero attraction to me as I am not interested in swinging swords at things. Games I have played for hundreds and even thousands of hours include: well set up physical pinball games, Arkanoid, Tetris, Centipede and now 3D Ultra Pinball Thrillride (3DUPT). My son was playing a free demo of 3DUPT and got me interested. We ended up buying the game online (via Amazon) for something like $6 plus s+h as the game is no longer mainstream apparently.
The pinball "feel" is truly impressive, playing better than a physical pinball game mainly because the flipper contacts never arc and corrode and become flaky. Unlike most PC pinball games that are portrait-style like the arcade versions they emulate, 3DUPT uses the full 4 by 3 ratio screen to great effect. 3 sets of flippers, multi ball, sub-level playing fields -- not innovative in themselves but superbly done parts of a perfect game.
The 3DUPT demo timed out after you earned 2 million points. Eventually we would try to earn that on the first ball. Whoop. My current personal record on the full 3DUPT is 135 billion, with a typical top game lasting 4 to 6 hours, spread over as much time as I like. I have played and paused games for up to 3 days. Another part of the beauty of 3DUPT is I never have to pay-to-play it again -- even burning a CD backup of the game required no hacking tool, a refreshing change.
Part of the ongoing enjoyment of playing 3DUPT is trying to beat my previous high score. At any point the ball can drain and if it drains quickly just a couple of times my chance of breaking the record during that game will be over so I have to stay sharp continuously. The same is true of Arkanoid, Centipede and physical pinball games in general. By the way, this sounds like the opposite of WoW and many/most of the other games mentioned.
I track my scores in other parts of the game -- longest ball duration, largest bonus, etc. -- and my son and I have talked numerous times on ways we would improve the game. I can't imagine playing a game with a cap on it (e.g. a quest that ends predictably for one and all). Pinball never ends and you get out of it what you put in.
So, 3DUPT is a game I'd pay money for. Before I found out I could easily back up the game I even planned to buy several more copies of it as backups. Make more games like this and I will buy them. WoW is for Sci-Fi types, I prefer ESPN. MMOs are for chatter types, I prefer something that can be paused or played entirely on my whim. WoW and most games in general these days are violent and repetitive, I prefer good old hand-eye coordination activities (including real football, soccer, etc).
I am able to cut out unwanted parts of the DivX files my D'zign DV-5 creates, then resave the file and A/V is still synced. But maybe you were implying that DivX format would not be good enough?
By the way, anyone know where to get batteries (or any kind of support/service) for the DV-5? The 'official' web link has email addresses that bounce, etc.
Recumbent bikes are cool and faster than regular bikes because the legs are set up near the chest if you look at it horizontally (the long way) and cut down on wind resistance dramatically even without wind flairs and all that.
Recumbents are awkward bikes, from a balance point of view, because the wheelbase is too long (think chopper vs regular motorcycle), and you do not have good hand leverage to control them. I think they go faster because more power can be delivered to the crank -- I can only apply 170 pounds maximum (my body weight) with an upright bike (i.e. I stand on a pedal). Compare that to 750 to 1,000+ pounds of force (my Universal Gym leg press ability in high school was 750 pounds) when you are "recumbant" _and_ your feet are pushing against something, i.e. the back of your chair/seat. No contest. In addition, while recumbant only your feet move. When upright you have to lift your body up and down to get that 170 pounds of force, otherwise it is even less than this. In short, the recumbant advantage is huge and there should be two separate records IMO.
I saw Lenovo in there twice, and there were duplicate pages for a shoe as well.
Next thing you know it is more secure than it was.
All those capable of withholding their bypass techniques please do so now...
and in the time it took to read my subject line $1,000.00 worth of bullets were fired in Iraq. Nice to see we have our priorities set up correctly.
More generally, MS rarely ships buggy software, and when they do they ship patches (at least prior to XP). They make the big bucks in deliberating crippling designs, thus forcing users onward and ever upward.
I think that one would more likely go: "Son, you got caught with thousands of illegal music tracks on your iPod? No driving the Beamer for a week."
With NetFlix, the "one DVD a day" turned out to be a bad dream. The reality was more like one every two days. The other big problem was they didn't have every DVD I wanted to watch. Amazon does but it takes a week to get it. A rare-movie-burned-while-I-wait sounds like a niche-filler to me -- bring it on.
I load Task Manager on startup, configured to minimize to the system tray. Very handy in diagnosing when things go 100%. Makes it faster to load in a (very rare) emergency as well.
I spent ten minutes scrolling slashdot comments before I found the first "print.html" reference so I feel your pain. However, once I downloaded and saved (yes, I'm a recovering anal retentive) the article and images I noticed it was almost 5MB in size. I imagine Tom's is not too keen on people downloading 5MB of data, only to click away after 30 seconds. But I shall remember to add "print.html" to the end of future Tom's Hardware stories, and for that I am so grateful that I am bequething one of my TRS Model 80s to Anonymous Coward -- could you please contact me at your convenience?
So let's mention David Icke (dot com) instead. I recommend "And The Truth Shall Set You Free" but probably any of it is worth the time.
It is quite an unforgettable experience to be the "Junior Barnes" in a room full of high level types working for a 100,000 person corporation who turn on you like a pack of dogs when you state that the design won't work. The most senior person in the room said just one thing, "Why wasn't I told of this earlier?" [I had been invited to this meeting almost on a whim, to help explain something if my boss floundered.]
Anyone remember the PCMag utility "Suggest"? It sent you a not-quite subliminal message of your choosing. They deliberately did not make it unnoticeable but maybe others have tweaked it since then. I still use one of their .com utilities: DR, or DirMagic.
I can't believe I tried everything but standard HTML
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowing_a_raspberry
By the way, how does one post a link associated with a word? It seems to require different code than what works in .SIGs.
So if we want anything to work, we have to build, not tear down. Pointing out flaws can be ok, if we are not just being mean about it. Trashing a system, then designing a better one is great. Trashing a system, then creating a second, third...nth one in addition (the current Linux model) is not very effective.
So Linux needs a baseline, with upgrades/sidegrades/replacements. It already has an important community, but listening more effectively to it will help with that baseline thingy.
I saw one this morning. Even rewould the tape to watch it again. Car comes racing along, stops, backs up, parallel parks into a spot -- trashing the cars in front and back in the process. I honestly don't remember what was being advertised, but I enjoyed it. Whoa, I was drinking coffee at the time...I think I just got chills.
More recently I have registered DivX (I have a D'zign DV5 DivX-creating digital camera), Acronis' True Image v9 and 3D Ultra Pinball Thrillride ;-) (just $5 thru one of Amazon's "aged software" partners) [current high score of ~1x10^^10].
The point is that we are all in this together. We should all buy/support/promote good products. Everything I listed above cost less than a high-end video card -- small potatoes, really, but a definite feel good.
I would also add that we should support good online sites -- two that come to mind are this site (that I have not yet registered with due to lack of perceived value in doing so) and PC Magazine's Utility download deal -- $20 for one year of utilities is not too shabby -- Instaback paid for a year in itself.
I thoroughly enjoyed this way of describing Windows 9x's stability. Thanks for setting up my day!
Well, it's not like I could do much with Win98, except trying to navigate around such crash-baiting activities as emptying a recycle bin or renaming a file in explorer.
I never bothered using Explorer (and still hardly ever do, I prefer the DOS prompt) but I did find that renaming a START Menu item and pressing enter caused a crash, whereas clicking OK did not. Love that QA.
For me and those I work with XP has been the way to go. One guy pushes Linux a fair bit but other than that XP, warts and all, has worked best. I think most people prefer a system that works out of the box, with occasional hassle VS a machine that takes tremendous tweaking to work with everything connected to it yet is stable afterward.
After all, consider a car analogy (with apologies to BadAnalogyGuy once again). One of the metrics of car quality is the number of defects the new car ships with. It is a metric because consumers get turned off when things don't fit right, aren't working, or are scratched, etc. Never mind that a trip to the shop for free repairs puts it all right as rain -- the damage is done.
Now if you want to trash XP, trash the swap algorithm -- useful only when turned off.
Not sure what you mean by constraints on native resolution. LCDs are designed for a native resolution that they look best at, where the pixels correspond one-to-one with the leds.
As to designers not liking LCDs, that is true for some but not all (from what I've read).