One of the few very nice things in Vista is that Startup programs launch at a lower priority, so that the system is as responsive as you need it to be right away:
The total boot time is divided into two parts
MainPathBootTime measures the time it takes for the system to load all drivers and services that are critical to user interaction and get to the Windows desktop where the user can begin doing things.
BootPostBootTime includes all the other drivers and processes that aren't critical to user interaction and can be loaded with low-priority I/O that always gives preference to user-initiated actions that execute using Normal I/O priority.
Any evidence that doesn't fit the millions of years belief system is routinely "lost" or ignored by the Smithsonian. This way of thinking has permeated the Smithsonian (and the scientific community) since the 1890s, and has ended the careers of hundreds of scientists.
Science is supposed to be about being free to ask (and test) the questions. Why is everybody so afraid of Creationism and Creation Science and Intelligent Design? If they are truly false, just let people run their experiments. In fact, give them some money so they can get it over with already. What's the harm? It will prove itself untrue and go away by itself, right?
So, tell me, why is it that everyone is so afraid of Creationism and ID? I would imagine that many of you were taught the Bible at a young age and no longer believe it, right? Is it so terrible to know what other people believe? There would be a lot less violence in the world if people understood where other people are coming from. Maybe the experiments they run will help guide science faster toward the truth. Ignoring evidence (a la the ostrich) never helps anyone in any discipline in life.
I had a High School teacher that made us read The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx at the height of the Cold War. His reason? Even if we don't agree with Communism, we will be richer for the experience if we understand it. It will help us understand and predict their moves and will ultimately force the end of Communism, since it was untenable as a governmental system (because it assumes the leaders will be altruistic instead of corrupt).
He was right. I'm glad I read it (and I still don't believe in Communism).
Agreed. I wrote one program for the Palm OS. It just showed the time on the screen really big. You would think that would be easy enough, but it took DAYS.
Writing for Windows Mobile in.NET is a BREEZE compared to that (writing that clock app on Windows would take 1 minute) even with the frustration of 60% of the Framework being missing.
In the 500MHz days, I tried Mandrake Linux, which I was told was "as easy as Windows". "It finds all your hardware and just works." After spending a month trying to get it on the network and talking to a Windows share (with some success), I decided it was just too difficult, like the previous post is saying.
That was then, this is now. I installed Ubuntu Feisty on 2 laptops and it just worked. All the hardware really was found and installing programs with--ready for this--the Add/Remove Programs menu option...is brain-dead simple. Connecting to network shares is just as easy as Windows. In some cases, I have gone to the command line to install something, but 99% of the time, it's just:
sudo apt-get install name-of-program
Ooh, that's hard.
The biggest problem was that I had to type in 3 command-line commands to get a wireless network card to work. But on Windows XP, I had to call India 3 times to do the same thing, so what's really easier? Hint: the command line was much faster...
Linux is no longer a frustrating command-line-ridden exercise for a Windows user. In fact, if you are already using Firefox and OpenOffice, which I was, you will find it to be very similar.
I have found Linux equivalents for most of what I do. Also, I have gotten many programs to work under Wine just fine. I haven't even found the need to install a Windows virtual machine yet, and it's been over a month.
All that to say, your comments are a little outdated. I thought the same as you did until Vista frustrated me so much that I gave Ubuntu a spin.
Why don't we make "attempted torture" a crime first? And then when Gonzalez is in prison for it, then we can start listening to his bill about copying a few files and losing a billionaire another $4 latte.
While I have had DVRs for almost a decade now and I hate ads as much as the next guy (and you can usually skip the Disney preview on the DVD by hitting >>| ), everybody needs to calm down and RT*A.
THIS IS FOR FREE VOD ONLY. (I had to shout above the noise level in here.) Disney and ABC didn't want to charge people for VOD so they said, "We'll offer all these hit shows and College Football games for free if you disable the ad skipping."
Now, what precedent this sets and where it goes from here is another matter. But for right now, this seems like a reasonably fair trade-off. If you forgot to record a show, your options now are:
Download a torrent (takes a long time, the quality is questionable, may be blocked for some people, have to watch on your computer, etc.)
Get a friend to make you a VHS tape or DVD (become an annoyance to your family and friends, wait several days, etc.)
Wait for the official DVDs (have to stop watching the season because of spoilers, pay $59.95, forced viewing of FBI warnings and previews)
Watch the FREE VOD version the next day with unskippable ads
Given those choices, I think the FREE VOD version sounds like the most convenient option.
ME was a disaster partially because they took away easy access to the DOS prompt, which was required for techs to work on the hybrid OS. Therefore, techs hated it, recommended against it to all their friends, ridiculed them when they did have it and told them that everyone "cool" stayed on 98SE.
Also, Microsoft screwed up the driver model, causing ALL scanners and ALL older non-plug-and-play hardware to die a horrible death. Everybody with older hardware (and the techs helping them) found it cheaper and easier to reinstall 98SE instead.
Many games were horribly broken on Windows 2000, as game developers dragged their feet. I tested about 30 of my kids' Reader Rabbit type games on Windows 2000 and could only get about 5-6 working. On XP, to my complete amazement, 29 of the same 30 games worked out of the box (or with only minor tweaking of the "Run as Windows Version" options). The funny thing is that only 28 of the 30 worked on Windows 98SE. But setting the problem (Windows 3.1) game to "Run as Windows 95" fixed it.
Vista is hard for techs to work on. They don't like it. They keep telling their friends that they are cooler to stay on Windows XP.
With Vista, Microsoft screwed up the driver model causing MOST existing hardware to die a horrible death (and my MOST I do mean more than half of what worked on XP). It is cheaper and easier to reinstall XP instead.
Vista won't run hundreds of games that work perfectly on XP.
Actually, you do really agree with me (and thanks for the civil discussion).
I am not against CRUD procedures per se, just that it's really bad performance if they are considered to be the be all and end all. Procedures should match what people are doing, not how databases are designed. Which is what I think you just said. I only add CRUD procedures when I need a specific one for a specific table. And in my experience, it's sometimes good to have C and U be the same one (insert or update logic). In a well-designed database, you shouldn't need CRUD on every table, because some tables will be key maps and such.
All applications must be re-tested anyway if SQL changes, even if it's in a data layer or stored procedure. And I can search throughout applications for a Table name as easily as for a Stored Procedure name. In fact, I need to anyway to see what needs to be re-tested. So, the whole updating argument falls a little flat in my experience since the net result is very similar: make a change, find all the apps that called that and where and then test those features to make sure you didn't screw up anything. Don't get me wrong, I do believe that stored procedures or a data access layer are good ideas, especially for security purposes, but they really don't help reduce the load when changes occur. People that think they do are the ones that everyone else hates for breaking their application because they didn't know it called that SP.
In my experience, CRUD procedures lead lazy programmers to bad SQL. And in my experience, attempting to fight human nature is a losing battle every time. They just call the CRUDs 100 times instead of doing something smart in a single SQL statement. This doesn't lead to horrible performance that you will notice, just poor performance that, when added together with the 100 other instances of this will lead to horrible performance, but benchmarks won't show you why because any given data point isn't that bad.
I am not arguing that the idea of a transaction is bad, I am just saying that for performance reasons transactions should be handled in a single SQL batch if at all possible. Making a database wait for something else you are doing in your app is a really bad idea, and the cause of almost ALL of the hardest performance bugs to track down, and usually in a place that you have no idea to look in because it's locking something it really doesn't need to. Again, we are saying the same thing.
I never use cursors, and I have already stated the case for Dynamic SQL. It has its place, sometimes. And make sure EVERY piece of data going into them is checked with Regular Expressions for exactly what you are expecting to see. But religious elitism against Dynamic SQL just leads to searches taking 5 seconds when they should come in under 1/2 second.
Which reminds me, something I was going to put into the original post:
In development (meaning full data but no load on the server),
90% of your database calls should come in under.1 seconds
another 9% should come in under.3 seconds
1% should come in under.5 seconds
In my experience, if you are exceeding these numbers, you are almost certainly writing your SQL poorly. Or you need an index. Or something. The slowest SQL I ever wrote was fixing someone else's stored procedure that was timing out because it was taking over 2 minutes to run. First, I immediately got it down to 45 seconds simply by adding an index on the field they were searching. But after rewriting it, I got it down to 4.5 seconds. It turns out that there were 40 million records in the table and it was running on a single 450 MHz machine (yes, people sometimes run corporations this way), so I forgave myself for being 9 times over my usual limit.
I'll probably get completely trashed for this advice, but I find the following run counter to "the standards", but to be essential for good database performance.
CRUD procedures are often bad for performance. People will send 100 individual queries to the server to do something that could be done in 1. This is common. Or, the middle tier will send 100 queries to the database to do the work of 1. Whatever. In either case, it's bad.
As long as the Stored Procedures/Middle Tier are dealing with single records instead of what the application requires, it's written wrong. But I have seen many database admins that throw up CRUD procedures and then turn off all access to the database, leaving developers no choice. And requests to add additional Stored Procedures are denied because "there are 400 Stored Procedures already".
Transactions are really bad for performance. Really bad. They should be avoided whenever possible. Any Stored Procedure call or single batch sent to most SQL Servers automatically have an implied transaction put around them anyway. Why do you want to hold up the entire database when someone accidentally pulls the network cable on your PC?
Get in and get out as quickly as possible if you want to scale your application well. Make sure the Stored Procedure or Middle Tier does everything you want and does it using a single DB call, not 100 calls to CRUD procedures.
Dynamic SQL has its place sometimes. And there's no substitute for it when it does. You have to know when it's necessary and it should be less than 1% of your total SQL calls. Don't make excuses to be lazy. But when you need variable numbers of columns based on what the user selected you can achieve massive performance gains over any other method.
As long as you are not a Christian or some other group they dislike.
You're fine in America, too, as long as you tow the company line. That's the problem with police states. It's not the sheep who line up to follow all the rules that have a problem, it's anyone considered "different". That's what America is supposed to protect. My ability to believe and speak as I please as long as I am not hurting anyone else. But we seem to be quickly losing those rights.
The only thing the Chinese students saw was that the propaganda is different, and they decided ours was wrong, while most Americans would say theirs is wrong.
Most likely, the truth is that they are both wrong.
(Notice they change their name every couple years despite being a monopoly.)
Moving into my new house, I try to get DSL service (which I already had at my old house). I call a full 6 weeks ahead to make sure. Cable modem was not released in our area yet, so there was only one option. The install date is 7 1/2 weeks later. I decide we can live without internet for a week and a half.
They show up and say it's impossible. I'm too far from the CO. Now, mind you, my next door neighbor has DSL and he is 50 FEET FARTHER from the CO. But they don't care about that.
After 10 more months and a few calls to the California Public Utilities Commission, I finally get my DSL and for the price at which I had it previously. Our phone bill is wrong EVERY MONTH FOR THE NEXT 18 MONTHS with installation fees and early termination fees over and over again. My wife spends 2 hours a month correcting the phone bill.
For my business, I decide to get 714-PROD4ME since I called it and it's out of service. Cool! First, they say I can't get it because it's assigned to a residential area (even though it's not in use). It just so happens that one of my employees lives in that area, so I have him get it as a second line residentially (just to get the number), but they tell him it's "attached" to the neighboring CO AND IT CAN'T BE TRANSFERRED (even though I know lots of people that have), so he gets it as a forwarding number to our business for $18/month. Not too bad.
Then, we try to transfer it to the business, because once you have a number, according to the law they MUST let you keep that number. So they come up with excuses like it can't be transferred from residential to business, but we are on the phone together and he says it's OK. Then they say that since it's a forwarding number, it can't be transferred to a "normal account". Then they say that it will cost $42/month to transfer it to a business number and $42/month minimum for the number it transfers to. Then they say that I can't get Call Busy Rollover on that number (which, of course, I need) BECAUSE THE NUMBER HAS ALREADY BEEN FORWARDED. Nevermind that I have worked at lots of places with P/S/A where they can do this just fine.
I finally switch to Vonage lines, because they are cheaper for more lines and they don't put me through this kind of nonsense. Then P/S/A won't transfer my number to Vonage, saying that only residential and business numbers can be transferred, not "forwarding" numbers. Then they tell me that for only $280 installation and $87/month (for at least one month), I could set up a "virtual office" in the area where the number resides and they could transfer it to that. I said, "You WILL transfer the number to Vonage for free now, or you will do it for free after I call the CPUC and file a complaint." They say that it's technically impossible, it can't be done unless I pay them over $350.
I file a complaint online with the PUC (about 5 minutes) and the number transfers 2 BUSINESS DAYS LATER. Then they waste the time writing me 3 physical letters (one personalized non-boilerplate), 4 e-mails and 2 phone calls (one a customer satisfaction survey about my experience with P/S/A ?!?), wasting at least 20 manhours when they could have just done it.
There you go, my foreign brothers, THAT is why people hate the monopoly phone companies...
But will it run Linux?
on
Palm to go Linux
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
But will it run Linux? Oh, wait, what story is this?
I do this all the time. I put my second monitor in portrait mode, so that way I can edit Word documents and view web pages and source code in portrait mode, which is far preferable. At my old work, I used a monitor that people were going to throw away and fixed it and just put it on my desk sideways. Sure, a few people thought I was a dork, but then they wondered how I got my work done so fast. (Besides, truth be told, they thought I was a dork before this anyway.)
I mean, why do we have everything in landscape mode, anyway? The only reason is because at the beginning, it was the only way to fit the 80 columns required by languages such as Cobol. Also, 80 columns matched the output of your original dot matrix (in text mode) and typewriter-style printers. That's the only reason and we're stuck with it today. People get stuck in tradition and are unable to analyze things for themselves.
So, currently, I have a 16X9 laptop screen which is great for videos, spreadsheets, e-mail, graphics, etc. And a Samsung LCD flat screen that rotates to portrait that I use for documents, source code and web pages. If I need to code from a document or web page, I can always move it fullscreen to the other monitor.
"Religious" people aren't rejecting the kind of observational science that leads to inventions.
They are rejecting the wild guesses about the Big Bang (matter from nothing), Evolution (with no intermediate forms found and no proof of mutations that add DNA complexity), etc. They are part of the "scientific dogma" that must exist because otherwise there might be a God.
Benjamin Franklin was a very religious Christian (and even a Creationist!). That didn't stop him from inventing electrical generation or bifocals. And there are many other Christians that create new scientific inventions all the time.
Just because Christians don't necessarily believe wild stories about asteroids killing off dinosaurs (with absolutely zero proof other than verbal repetition), doesn't mean they are against science. (They have different wild stories from the Bible that they prefer to believe.)
In the good old days I remember someone getting a virus at work that destroyed EGA monitors. After hooking up and destroying another EGA monitor, I put in a Hercules Monochrome card, found the virus and removed it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a big assumption. And you'd better pray you're right.
Do you want to revise your opinion since they already have a faster take-up than DVD?
Just wait until the players are $199 at Wal-Mart. Talk to me again after they reach $99.
It did. Or at least I thought it did until the theater erupted into applause.
Who needs plot, character development, logic, suspension of disbelief? Not the audience I was with...
Microsoft has "ethos"? When did this happen? I figure that would have been big news.
Because by caring enough to vote an ad down, you are proving to the evil marketers that you saw it.
It's like spam. They don't care if you hate it. As long as you saw it/remember it.
One of the few very nice things in Vista is that Startup programs launch at a lower priority, so that the system is as responsive as you need it to be right away:
The total boot time is divided into two parts
Any evidence that doesn't fit the millions of years belief system is routinely "lost" or ignored by the Smithsonian. This way of thinking has permeated the Smithsonian (and the scientific community) since the 1890s, and has ended the careers of hundreds of scientists.
Science is supposed to be about being free to ask (and test) the questions. Why is everybody so afraid of Creationism and Creation Science and Intelligent Design? If they are truly false, just let people run their experiments. In fact, give them some money so they can get it over with already. What's the harm? It will prove itself untrue and go away by itself, right?
So, tell me, why is it that everyone is so afraid of Creationism and ID? I would imagine that many of you were taught the Bible at a young age and no longer believe it, right? Is it so terrible to know what other people believe? There would be a lot less violence in the world if people understood where other people are coming from. Maybe the experiments they run will help guide science faster toward the truth. Ignoring evidence (a la the ostrich) never helps anyone in any discipline in life.
I had a High School teacher that made us read The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx at the height of the Cold War. His reason? Even if we don't agree with Communism, we will be richer for the experience if we understand it. It will help us understand and predict their moves and will ultimately force the end of Communism, since it was untenable as a governmental system (because it assumes the leaders will be altruistic instead of corrupt).
He was right. I'm glad I read it (and I still don't believe in Communism).
Agreed. I wrote one program for the Palm OS. It just showed the time on the screen really big. You would think that would be easy enough, but it took DAYS.
Writing for Windows Mobile in .NET is a BREEZE compared to that (writing that clock app on Windows would take 1 minute) even with the frustration of 60% of the Framework being missing.
In the 500MHz days, I tried Mandrake Linux, which I was told was "as easy as Windows". "It finds all your hardware and just works." After spending a month trying to get it on the network and talking to a Windows share (with some success), I decided it was just too difficult, like the previous post is saying.
That was then, this is now. I installed Ubuntu Feisty on 2 laptops and it just worked. All the hardware really was found and installing programs with--ready for this--the Add/Remove Programs menu option...is brain-dead simple. Connecting to network shares is just as easy as Windows. In some cases, I have gone to the command line to install something, but 99% of the time, it's just:
Ooh, that's hard.
The biggest problem was that I had to type in 3 command-line commands to get a wireless network card to work. But on Windows XP, I had to call India 3 times to do the same thing, so what's really easier? Hint: the command line was much faster...
Linux is no longer a frustrating command-line-ridden exercise for a Windows user. In fact, if you are already using Firefox and OpenOffice, which I was, you will find it to be very similar.
I have found Linux equivalents for most of what I do. Also, I have gotten many programs to work under Wine just fine. I haven't even found the need to install a Windows virtual machine yet, and it's been over a month.
All that to say, your comments are a little outdated. I thought the same as you did until Vista frustrated me so much that I gave Ubuntu a spin.
Why don't we make "attempted torture" a crime first? And then when Gonzalez is in prison for it, then we can start listening to his bill about copying a few files and losing a billionaire another $4 latte.
You forgot the HD-DVD / Blu-Ray crack.
While I have had DVRs for almost a decade now and I hate ads as much as the next guy (and you can usually skip the Disney preview on the DVD by hitting >>| ), everybody needs to calm down and RT*A.
THIS IS FOR FREE VOD ONLY. (I had to shout above the noise level in here.) Disney and ABC didn't want to charge people for VOD so they said, "We'll offer all these hit shows and College Football games for free if you disable the ad skipping."
Now, what precedent this sets and where it goes from here is another matter. But for right now, this seems like a reasonably fair trade-off. If you forgot to record a show, your options now are:
Given those choices, I think the FREE VOD version sounds like the most convenient option.
Is this the same military that, right now, is testing new headgear for soldiers that shows the position of friendlies 30 seconds later?
Um, yeah, good luck with that "beating the speed of thought" thing...
...American software, American movies...
ME was a disaster partially because they took away easy access to the DOS prompt, which was required for techs to work on the hybrid OS. Therefore, techs hated it, recommended against it to all their friends, ridiculed them when they did have it and told them that everyone "cool" stayed on 98SE.
Also, Microsoft screwed up the driver model, causing ALL scanners and ALL older non-plug-and-play hardware to die a horrible death. Everybody with older hardware (and the techs helping them) found it cheaper and easier to reinstall 98SE instead.
Many games were horribly broken on Windows 2000, as game developers dragged their feet. I tested about 30 of my kids' Reader Rabbit type games on Windows 2000 and could only get about 5-6 working. On XP, to my complete amazement, 29 of the same 30 games worked out of the box (or with only minor tweaking of the "Run as Windows Version" options). The funny thing is that only 28 of the 30 worked on Windows 98SE. But setting the problem (Windows 3.1) game to "Run as Windows 95" fixed it.
Vista is hard for techs to work on. They don't like it. They keep telling their friends that they are cooler to stay on Windows XP.
With Vista, Microsoft screwed up the driver model causing MOST existing hardware to die a horrible death (and my MOST I do mean more than half of what worked on XP). It is cheaper and easier to reinstall XP instead.
Vista won't run hundreds of games that work perfectly on XP.
See the problem?
Actually, you do really agree with me (and thanks for the civil discussion).
I am not against CRUD procedures per se, just that it's really bad performance if they are considered to be the be all and end all. Procedures should match what people are doing, not how databases are designed. Which is what I think you just said. I only add CRUD procedures when I need a specific one for a specific table. And in my experience, it's sometimes good to have C and U be the same one (insert or update logic). In a well-designed database, you shouldn't need CRUD on every table, because some tables will be key maps and such.
All applications must be re-tested anyway if SQL changes, even if it's in a data layer or stored procedure. And I can search throughout applications for a Table name as easily as for a Stored Procedure name. In fact, I need to anyway to see what needs to be re-tested. So, the whole updating argument falls a little flat in my experience since the net result is very similar: make a change, find all the apps that called that and where and then test those features to make sure you didn't screw up anything. Don't get me wrong, I do believe that stored procedures or a data access layer are good ideas, especially for security purposes, but they really don't help reduce the load when changes occur. People that think they do are the ones that everyone else hates for breaking their application because they didn't know it called that SP.
In my experience, CRUD procedures lead lazy programmers to bad SQL. And in my experience, attempting to fight human nature is a losing battle every time. They just call the CRUDs 100 times instead of doing something smart in a single SQL statement. This doesn't lead to horrible performance that you will notice, just poor performance that, when added together with the 100 other instances of this will lead to horrible performance, but benchmarks won't show you why because any given data point isn't that bad.
I am not arguing that the idea of a transaction is bad, I am just saying that for performance reasons transactions should be handled in a single SQL batch if at all possible. Making a database wait for something else you are doing in your app is a really bad idea, and the cause of almost ALL of the hardest performance bugs to track down, and usually in a place that you have no idea to look in because it's locking something it really doesn't need to. Again, we are saying the same thing.
I never use cursors, and I have already stated the case for Dynamic SQL. It has its place, sometimes. And make sure EVERY piece of data going into them is checked with Regular Expressions for exactly what you are expecting to see. But religious elitism against Dynamic SQL just leads to searches taking 5 seconds when they should come in under 1/2 second.
Which reminds me, something I was going to put into the original post:
In development (meaning full data but no load on the server),
In my experience, if you are exceeding these numbers, you are almost certainly writing your SQL poorly. Or you need an index. Or something. The slowest SQL I ever wrote was fixing someone else's stored procedure that was timing out because it was taking over 2 minutes to run. First, I immediately got it down to 45 seconds simply by adding an index on the field they were searching. But after rewriting it, I got it down to 4.5 seconds. It turns out that there were 40 million records in the table and it was running on a single 450 MHz machine (yes, people sometimes run corporations this way), so I forgave myself for being 9 times over my usual limit.
I'll probably get completely trashed for this advice, but I find the following run counter to "the standards", but to be essential for good database performance.
CRUD procedures are often bad for performance. People will send 100 individual queries to the server to do something that could be done in 1. This is common. Or, the middle tier will send 100 queries to the database to do the work of 1. Whatever. In either case, it's bad.
As long as the Stored Procedures/Middle Tier are dealing with single records instead of what the application requires, it's written wrong. But I have seen many database admins that throw up CRUD procedures and then turn off all access to the database, leaving developers no choice. And requests to add additional Stored Procedures are denied because "there are 400 Stored Procedures already".
Transactions are really bad for performance. Really bad. They should be avoided whenever possible. Any Stored Procedure call or single batch sent to most SQL Servers automatically have an implied transaction put around them anyway. Why do you want to hold up the entire database when someone accidentally pulls the network cable on your PC?
Get in and get out as quickly as possible if you want to scale your application well. Make sure the Stored Procedure or Middle Tier does everything you want and does it using a single DB call, not 100 calls to CRUD procedures.
Dynamic SQL has its place sometimes. And there's no substitute for it when it does. You have to know when it's necessary and it should be less than 1% of your total SQL calls. Don't make excuses to be lazy. But when you need variable numbers of columns based on what the user selected you can achieve massive performance gains over any other method.
As long as you are not a Christian or some other group they dislike.
You're fine in America, too, as long as you tow the company line. That's the problem with police states. It's not the sheep who line up to follow all the rules that have a problem, it's anyone considered "different". That's what America is supposed to protect. My ability to believe and speak as I please as long as I am not hurting anyone else. But we seem to be quickly losing those rights.
The only thing the Chinese students saw was that the propaganda is different, and they decided ours was wrong, while most Americans would say theirs is wrong.
Most likely, the truth is that they are both wrong.
(Notice they change their name every couple years despite being a monopoly.)
Moving into my new house, I try to get DSL service (which I already had at my old house). I call a full 6 weeks ahead to make sure. Cable modem was not released in our area yet, so there was only one option. The install date is 7 1/2 weeks later. I decide we can live without internet for a week and a half.
They show up and say it's impossible. I'm too far from the CO. Now, mind you, my next door neighbor has DSL and he is 50 FEET FARTHER from the CO. But they don't care about that.
After 10 more months and a few calls to the California Public Utilities Commission, I finally get my DSL and for the price at which I had it previously. Our phone bill is wrong EVERY MONTH FOR THE NEXT 18 MONTHS with installation fees and early termination fees over and over again. My wife spends 2 hours a month correcting the phone bill.
For my business, I decide to get 714-PROD4ME since I called it and it's out of service. Cool! First, they say I can't get it because it's assigned to a residential area (even though it's not in use). It just so happens that one of my employees lives in that area, so I have him get it as a second line residentially (just to get the number), but they tell him it's "attached" to the neighboring CO AND IT CAN'T BE TRANSFERRED (even though I know lots of people that have), so he gets it as a forwarding number to our business for $18/month. Not too bad.
Then, we try to transfer it to the business, because once you have a number, according to the law they MUST let you keep that number. So they come up with excuses like it can't be transferred from residential to business, but we are on the phone together and he says it's OK. Then they say that since it's a forwarding number, it can't be transferred to a "normal account". Then they say that it will cost $42/month to transfer it to a business number and $42/month minimum for the number it transfers to. Then they say that I can't get Call Busy Rollover on that number (which, of course, I need) BECAUSE THE NUMBER HAS ALREADY BEEN FORWARDED. Nevermind that I have worked at lots of places with P/S/A where they can do this just fine.
I finally switch to Vonage lines, because they are cheaper for more lines and they don't put me through this kind of nonsense. Then P/S/A won't transfer my number to Vonage, saying that only residential and business numbers can be transferred, not "forwarding" numbers. Then they tell me that for only $280 installation and $87/month (for at least one month), I could set up a "virtual office" in the area where the number resides and they could transfer it to that. I said, "You WILL transfer the number to Vonage for free now, or you will do it for free after I call the CPUC and file a complaint." They say that it's technically impossible, it can't be done unless I pay them over $350.
I file a complaint online with the PUC (about 5 minutes) and the number transfers 2 BUSINESS DAYS LATER. Then they waste the time writing me 3 physical letters (one personalized non-boilerplate), 4 e-mails and 2 phone calls (one a customer satisfaction survey about my experience with P/S/A ?!?), wasting at least 20 manhours when they could have just done it.
There you go, my foreign brothers, THAT is why people hate the monopoly phone companies...
But will it run Linux? Oh, wait, what story is this?
I do this all the time. I put my second monitor in portrait mode, so that way I can edit Word documents and view web pages and source code in portrait mode, which is far preferable. At my old work, I used a monitor that people were going to throw away and fixed it and just put it on my desk sideways. Sure, a few people thought I was a dork, but then they wondered how I got my work done so fast. (Besides, truth be told, they thought I was a dork before this anyway.)
I mean, why do we have everything in landscape mode, anyway? The only reason is because at the beginning, it was the only way to fit the 80 columns required by languages such as Cobol. Also, 80 columns matched the output of your original dot matrix (in text mode) and typewriter-style printers. That's the only reason and we're stuck with it today. People get stuck in tradition and are unable to analyze things for themselves.
So, currently, I have a 16X9 laptop screen which is great for videos, spreadsheets, e-mail, graphics, etc. And a Samsung LCD flat screen that rotates to portrait that I use for documents, source code and web pages. If I need to code from a document or web page, I can always move it fullscreen to the other monitor.
"Religious" people aren't rejecting the kind of observational science that leads to inventions.
They are rejecting the wild guesses about the Big Bang (matter from nothing), Evolution (with no intermediate forms found and no proof of mutations that add DNA complexity), etc. They are part of the "scientific dogma" that must exist because otherwise there might be a God.
Benjamin Franklin was a very religious Christian (and even a Creationist!). That didn't stop him from inventing electrical generation or bifocals. And there are many other Christians that create new scientific inventions all the time.
Just because Christians don't necessarily believe wild stories about asteroids killing off dinosaurs (with absolutely zero proof other than verbal repetition), doesn't mean they are against science. (They have different wild stories from the Bible that they prefer to believe.)
In the good old days I remember someone getting a virus at work that destroyed EGA monitors. After hooking up and destroying another EGA monitor, I put in a Hercules Monochrome card, found the virus and removed it.
That's been a long time, though...
This is so untrue. My brother has a 27" 720p HDTV and you can EASILY tell the difference between an upconverted DVD and HD.
It is absolutely true with my 50" 720p.
But does it run Linux?