It is not $0. You have to factor in the cost of everything you give up by not upgrading. For example, the inability to run modern browsers (i.e. the cost of giving up the ability to visit modern websites). The cost of not being able to run modern software (i.e. the cost of not being able to view and edit modern file formats). The cost of not being able to use modern hardware (i.e. plugging in a solid state disk, plugging in a modern digital camcorder, or plugging in one of those Lytro cameras). The cost of electricity (old hardware is way less energy efficient).
Then there is the cost of not being able to find replacement components should something break. If you lost your CPU, what would it cost to replace it in terms of not just replacement cost, but the cost to find the part, and the cost of downtime while waiting for the part? If the motherboard blew up, could you find an exact replacement? If not, will the replacement be compatible with the rest of your hardware? Will you still be able to find drivers for it?
No. The longer I've been in this industry, the more I've become convinced that there is a significant cost to *not* upgrading and the *longer* you put off upgrades, the more expensive it will be once you eventually upgrade. It is easier, far less risky and thus far less costly to make incremental upgrades than it is to make sweeping changes every so often. You will at some point eventually have to bite the bullet and upgrade or you and your skills will become irrelevant. Might as well do it in small doses then as some large wholesale change.
4GB has been like the minimum threshold for any halfway decent computer built in the last four or five years. It is peanuts for ram. These days, 8GB or even 16GB should be considered the minimum for any new machine.
This is supposed to be a fucking tech site! A "massive amount of memory" should be a desktop machine built in some guys garage with 2TB of ram on it. The machine should be running some nightly build of an obscure, hand-compiled Linux distro with a nightly build of Firefox (ideally with a completely different rendering engine spliced in, just for bonus points). Instead we have some fuckwit who is running what seems to be a rickety old P4 bitching about a god damn three year old browser and I'm sitting here replying to somebody who thinks 4GB of ram is "massive". How fucking depressing is that?
That I even need to type this on Slashdot of all places astounds me. No wonder people consider Slashdot irrelevant. These topics shouldn't even be open for debate. You are a nerd. This is a tech site. What the fuck is there to debate? More Ram == Good. Newer Versions == Better. Always. Upgrade your fucking browser. Build a new machine. Embrace fucking change. What the hell people?
Slashdot. News for tech luddites. Stuff that mattered 10 years ago.
This has to be the dumbest fucking story I have ever read on this site. I can't tell if this article is serious or meant for a laugh. Sadly I think it is serious.
As I write this, there is a nearby access point named "CIA Surveillance Van". You think that is the fucking CIA? Should submit a story about that?
Jesus fucking christ. This is a new low for this site.
Well, according to the Seattle PI, they are accused of stealing more than $750,000 In computer equipment and other items. So no, these guys did just a little bit more than a $20 charge on some dudes card.
Even issh for that matter (still haven't figured out how to consistently copy in that app)?
I'd say RDP, the program, has some of the gestures figured out. Two finger tap = right click. Double tap= double click. The problem is how to translate things like "click, hold and drag" or "Slide the slider". A lot of that might be the protocol itself (doesn't windows have accessibility hooks so things know "this widget should behave like a scrollbar"?
I dunno. It is one of the reasons flash is not supported—those were designed for a mouse. A touch interface is a whole new ballgame that is uncharted water. There is no mouse, but there are perhaps ten fingers that can control an interface.
I think the game makers will be the ones to figure out how to exploit the possibilities. I have tons of games that would never work with a mouse.
How are most of these cheesy CSI-type programs created? I would assume they are done in flash. Are they usually interactive, in other words if the actor presses a button it does some predefined animation, or is the whole thing one long animation that the actor needs to time against?
In playing with IPv6 at home, the the biggest problem has been firewalling. Vista and windows 7 assume you are either on a public IP (aka in a coffee shop) or some kind of NAT'd or external fire walled environment (aka on a slightly more trusted IP).
At home, my little LAN is fully trusted. I like to keep all my gear open, full sharing, no passwords. Anything more is a hassle.
The problem is, with IPv6 you open your LAN to the outside world. That is okay *if* you have a firewall on your router. My router (d-link DIR-825) doesnt support firewalls for IPv6. neither does OpenWRT, which can run on that box too.
Until they make low-cost consumer routers that support comprehensive IPv6 firewalling, I can't really justify running IPv6 at home.
That is false security. Once ipv6 goes big people will harvest active ipv6 addresses out of server logs, one pixel images on message boards, or any other imaginative way they can think of.
So yeah, scanning your subnet is out, but if you actively use the Internet, they will get your address.
If you are doing mainly drawing, and not GUI (ie traditonal GUI widgets on a traditional window with with traditional GUI events) you might want to look into XNA. It is basically a managed version of DirectX. Because it is.NET you can hook into winforms and WPF to create the occasional "traditonal" GUI.
Otherwise, if it is a windows app, there is no better choice than WPF. It is intimidating at first because with WPF you can easily reskin just about any uielement (and create UIelements from any class you create). But once you realize how classes and the actual UI are separate concerns that are joined only through very sophisticated data binding, you will be in love.
Complicated little beast though and if you come from a winforms background be prepared to do some major unlearning as how you bind data and events to the GUI is conceptually different. If you simply bind to "Button_OnClick" like you did in winforms you are doing it wrong. If you find yourself writing this.textbox1.text = myData.price in your code you are doing it very, very wring.
Now you are trolling. I'll pull this out of my ass but most of us are lucky to get above 3mbit. Here in Seattle, I can't get more though DSL.
If you can't see why people would want to burst to 150mbit and beyond, you have a serious lack of imagination. Here, I will use mine with tangible things i could do better if I could burst above 150mbit:
1) better VPN into work. It would be quicker to check the source code repository out. 2) faster online backup, and more important, backups that down slow down the Internet for everything else. 3) Uploading stuff to client FTP sites would be orders of magnitude faster. 4) software distribution would be faster thus people would do it more.
Nobody will be saturating their Internet, but the fact that everybody will be able to burst to speeds approximating that of a LAN will open many new doors and enable things that were not feasable before. I don't understand what is so hard to imagine about that.
That is only true if your SLA promises you can saturate that sweet ass gig link you have in your home. A business class account might have that kind of thing, but a residential account does not. If 100 residential people download something at the same time, combined they might saturate the backhaul, but their downloads would each be 1gb/100=10mb. And 10mbit is still better than what most of us shmucks get.
Basically, they charge $200 because they can. It has nothing to do with the actual cost of service.
Because people who buy an OC3 are actually using the capacity of their link. The end user—us Joe Shmoe's in our apartments, we barely use it at all. But when we do use it (say to watch an HD Netflix movie) we want it delivered fast.
So really, per gig used, $200 is very, very, very expensive if you pull down a dozen gigs a month (which is probably within reason for a netflix user)
I'll pay actual use if it is reasonable. Better would be to pay the same way Internet providers charge each other—95th percentile billing. Charge something like 50/mo for 1mbit. Give me a gigabit port, and 95% of the time I and most people wont go anywhere near that amount.
The problem is anybody but people who buy "real" Internet know what 95th percentile billing is—and even if they did they wouldn't understand it (nor should they need to, honestly). That is why most consumer grade Internet is either flat rate with five pages of small print, or it is charged per gig used.
Yes. Because investing in your nations infrastructure is a form if socialism. Well, at least according to enough tea party idiots in the US to block any attempt.
Well, that and the telcos have their hands far up the asses of our government. But doing away with that is messing with the free market, and thus also socialism. Basically, making things better==socialism. The only people who should have it good are corporations, which are also people—anything else is socialism.
Grand Theft Auto for the iPad is some 600 megs. It could have been more but they didn't use full motion cut scenes like they do on their bigger console-based cousins. The lady routinely buys these Myst-like games that are around 500mb.
750mb ain't much for a good game provided you play it enough. Plus the trick is to buy them in iTunes on your PC and just sync them up to the I*.
It isn't a shoddy gyro, it is just plain momentum. The iPad has a larger footprint than the iPhone and trying to rotate and shift it around to control a game in a precise manner is pretty difficult.
It sounds good in theory, and many apps have tried, but almost none if them work well.
Good news for some small sect of the US. Wake me when I can finally get more than 3mbit in the middle of Seattle up on Capitol Hill.
Qwest has been promising "OMG mega-fast Internet" for years now and they have yet to deliver. What gives?
Course I remember it being the same way when DSL was the new kid on the block. Took years before that was deployed everywhere. Remember trying to work out your distance to your central office to see if you would ever qualify?
Too bad that isn't netflix's call. The movie studios are the ones to blame, and I'm pretty sure they don't give a rusty rats ass if you can watch any movie on any media besides BluRay.
Though I have to wonder if Netflix has the political clout to tell the movie studios to piss off. I doubt it, they are completely dependent on said studios and making a hardline stance like "fuck you, we womt do business unless you remove the DRM" would be an easy to spot bluff. The movie studios have nothing to lose (in their mind) and everything to gain telling Netflix to take a hike.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe. You'd be better off with 8GB. I run a stack like yours and going from 4->8 was a godsend.
Eclipse (or in my case Aptana) really likes so suck the juice, so to speak :-)
But the total cost not to upgrade is $0.
It is not $0. You have to factor in the cost of everything you give up by not upgrading. For example, the inability to run modern browsers (i.e. the cost of giving up the ability to visit modern websites). The cost of not being able to run modern software (i.e. the cost of not being able to view and edit modern file formats). The cost of not being able to use modern hardware (i.e. plugging in a solid state disk, plugging in a modern digital camcorder, or plugging in one of those Lytro cameras). The cost of electricity (old hardware is way less energy efficient).
Then there is the cost of not being able to find replacement components should something break. If you lost your CPU, what would it cost to replace it in terms of not just replacement cost, but the cost to find the part, and the cost of downtime while waiting for the part? If the motherboard blew up, could you find an exact replacement? If not, will the replacement be compatible with the rest of your hardware? Will you still be able to find drivers for it?
No. The longer I've been in this industry, the more I've become convinced that there is a significant cost to *not* upgrading and the *longer* you put off upgrades, the more expensive it will be once you eventually upgrade. It is easier, far less risky and thus far less costly to make incremental upgrades than it is to make sweeping changes every so often. You will at some point eventually have to bite the bullet and upgrade or you and your skills will become irrelevant. Might as well do it in small doses then as some large wholesale change.
4GB has been like the minimum threshold for any halfway decent computer built in the last four or five years. It is peanuts for ram. These days, 8GB or even 16GB should be considered the minimum for any new machine.
This is supposed to be a fucking tech site! A "massive amount of memory" should be a desktop machine built in some guys garage with 2TB of ram on it. The machine should be running some nightly build of an obscure, hand-compiled Linux distro with a nightly build of Firefox (ideally with a completely different rendering engine spliced in, just for bonus points). Instead we have some fuckwit who is running what seems to be a rickety old P4 bitching about a god damn three year old browser and I'm sitting here replying to somebody who thinks 4GB of ram is "massive". How fucking depressing is that?
That I even need to type this on Slashdot of all places astounds me. No wonder people consider Slashdot irrelevant. These topics shouldn't even be open for debate. You are a nerd. This is a tech site. What the fuck is there to debate? More Ram == Good. Newer Versions == Better. Always. Upgrade your fucking browser. Build a new machine. Embrace fucking change. What the hell people?
Slashdot. News for tech luddites. Stuff that mattered 10 years ago.
Here's the full list of Reddit comments relating to that topic:
http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/onplj/feds_shut_down_megaupload/
God help us when people cite reddit as a source of truth.
This has to be the dumbest fucking story I have ever read on this site. I can't tell if this article is serious or meant for a laugh. Sadly I think it is serious.
As I write this, there is a nearby access point named "CIA Surveillance Van". You think that is the fucking CIA? Should submit a story about that?
Jesus fucking christ. This is a new low for this site.
Well, according to the Seattle PI, they are accused of stealing more than $750,000 In computer equipment and other items. So no, these guys did just a little bit more than a $20 charge on some dudes card.
Even issh for that matter (still haven't figured out how to consistently copy in that app)?
I'd say RDP, the program, has some of the gestures figured out. Two finger tap = right click. Double tap= double click. The problem is how to translate things like "click, hold and drag" or "Slide the slider". A lot of that might be the protocol itself (doesn't windows have accessibility hooks so things know "this widget should behave like a scrollbar"?
I dunno. It is one of the reasons flash is not supported—those were designed for a mouse. A touch interface is a whole new ballgame that is uncharted water. There is no mouse, but there are perhaps ten fingers that can control an interface.
I think the game makers will be the ones to figure out how to exploit the possibilities. I have tons of games that would never work with a mouse.
How are most of these cheesy CSI-type programs created? I would assume they are done in flash. Are they usually interactive, in other words if the actor presses a button it does some predefined animation, or is the whole thing one long animation that the actor needs to time against?
Somebody here has to have created one of these...
In playing with IPv6 at home, the the biggest problem has been firewalling. Vista and windows 7 assume you are either on a public IP (aka in a coffee shop) or some kind of NAT'd or external fire walled environment (aka on a slightly more trusted IP).
At home, my little LAN is fully trusted. I like to keep all my gear open, full sharing, no passwords. Anything more is a hassle.
The problem is, with IPv6 you open your LAN to the outside world. That is okay *if* you have a firewall on your router. My router (d-link DIR-825) doesnt support firewalls for IPv6. neither does OpenWRT, which can run on that box too.
Until they make low-cost consumer routers that support comprehensive IPv6 firewalling, I can't really justify running IPv6 at home.
Windmills don't take mass away from the planet. Mining a bunch of stuff and shipping it off the planet (er, moon) does.
Samsung. Every model they make has a different charger port.
That is false security. Once ipv6 goes big people will harvest active ipv6 addresses out of server logs, one pixel images on message boards, or any other imaginative way they can think of.
So yeah, scanning your subnet is out, but if you actively use the Internet, they will get your address.
And it doesn't have a firewall for ipv6. Without a firewall, I can't use it at all. Not even openwrt had a easy to manage ipv6 firewall.
If you are doing mainly drawing, and not GUI (ie traditonal GUI widgets on a traditional window with with traditional GUI events) you might want to look into XNA. It is basically a managed version of DirectX. Because it is .NET you can hook into winforms and WPF to create the occasional "traditonal" GUI.
Otherwise, if it is a windows app, there is no better choice than WPF. It is intimidating at first because with WPF you can easily reskin just about any uielement (and create UIelements from any class you create). But once you realize how classes and the actual UI are separate concerns that are joined only through very sophisticated data binding, you will be in love.
Complicated little beast though and if you come from a winforms background be prepared to do some major unlearning as how you bind data and events to the GUI is conceptually different. If you simply bind to "Button_OnClick" like you did in winforms you are doing it wrong. If you find yourself writing this.textbox1.text = myData.price in your code you are doing it very, very wring.
Hey, that's my IP address too you jerk!
Now you are trolling. I'll pull this out of my ass but most of us are lucky to get above 3mbit. Here in Seattle, I can't get more though DSL.
If you can't see why people would want to burst to 150mbit and beyond, you have a serious lack of imagination. Here, I will use mine with tangible things i could do better if I could burst above 150mbit:
1) better VPN into work. It would be quicker to check the source code repository out.
2) faster online backup, and more important, backups that down slow down the Internet for everything else.
3) Uploading stuff to client FTP sites would be orders of magnitude faster.
4) software distribution would be faster thus people would do it more.
Nobody will be saturating their Internet, but the fact that everybody will be able to burst to speeds approximating that of a LAN will open many new doors and enable things that were not feasable before. I don't understand what is so hard to imagine about that.
That is only true if your SLA promises you can saturate that sweet ass gig link you have in your home. A business class account might have that kind of thing, but a residential account does not. If 100 residential people download something at the same time, combined they might saturate the backhaul, but their downloads would each be 1gb/100=10mb. And 10mbit is still better than what most of us shmucks get.
Basically, they charge $200 because they can. It has nothing to do with the actual cost of service.
Because people who buy an OC3 are actually using the capacity of their link. The end user—us Joe Shmoe's in our apartments, we barely use it at all. But when we do use it (say to watch an HD Netflix movie) we want it delivered fast.
So really, per gig used, $200 is very, very, very expensive if you pull down a dozen gigs a month (which is probably within reason for a netflix user)
I'll pay actual use if it is reasonable. Better would be to pay the same way Internet providers charge each other—95th percentile billing. Charge something like 50/mo for 1mbit. Give me a gigabit port, and 95% of the time I and most people wont go anywhere near that amount.
The problem is anybody but people who buy "real" Internet know what 95th percentile billing is—and even if they did they wouldn't understand it (nor should they need to, honestly). That is why most consumer grade Internet is either flat rate with five pages of small print, or it is charged per gig used.
Yes. Because investing in your nations infrastructure is a form if socialism. Well, at least according to enough tea party idiots in the US to block any attempt.
Well, that and the telcos have their hands far up the asses of our government. But doing away with that is messing with the free market, and thus also socialism. Basically, making things better==socialism. The only people who should have it good are corporations, which are also people—anything else is socialism.
Grand Theft Auto for the iPad is some 600 megs. It could have been more but they didn't use full motion cut scenes like they do on their bigger console-based cousins. The lady routinely buys these Myst-like games that are around 500mb.
750mb ain't much for a good game provided you play it enough. Plus the trick is to buy them in iTunes on your PC and just sync them up to the I*.
It isn't a shoddy gyro, it is just plain momentum. The iPad has a larger footprint than the iPhone and trying to rotate and shift it around to control a game in a precise manner is pretty difficult.
It sounds good in theory, and many apps have tried, but almost none if them work well.
Good news for some small sect of the US. Wake me when I can finally get more than 3mbit in the middle of Seattle up on Capitol Hill.
Qwest has been promising "OMG mega-fast Internet" for years now and they have yet to deliver. What gives?
Course I remember it being the same way when DSL was the new kid on the block. Took years before that was deployed everywhere. Remember trying to work out your distance to your central office to see if you would ever qualify?
Too bad that isn't netflix's call. The movie studios are the ones to blame, and I'm pretty sure they don't give a rusty rats ass if you can watch any movie on any media besides BluRay.
Though I have to wonder if Netflix has the political clout to tell the movie studios to piss off. I doubt it, they are completely dependent on said studios and making a hardline stance like "fuck you, we womt do business unless you remove the DRM" would be an easy to spot bluff. The movie studios have nothing to lose (in their mind) and everything to gain telling Netflix to take a hike.
The 198x blazers were on the passenger side dash