Posts by Queasy Rider

Yes, but not all rectangles are squares. Sorry, I couldn't let that pass.

Re: A little (bad) math

Tom38: Thanks for reading my post so carefully. I'm not an IT guy (obviously), just someone with a Seagate 4TB and a Toshiba 3TB both packed to the gills with dvd back-ups, like an earlier commenter. If you had chosen to do the math you would have realized that New Egg can sell you 64TB of external storage for $140. x 16 = $2240. I wasn't suggesting that was practical for pro setup, only that for consumers like myself who are not IT pros, and already have a few multi-TB drives bulging with dvd backups, a $7,000 enclosure is not very appealing. By the way, where you came up with 140 drives I have no idea, but thanks for the reply.

That was my first thought, well except for the free aspect of it. I'd still charge them through the nose to use the service. After all, nobody rich values anything that is free.

Bought an Acer 9' Aspire One with XP years ago. Liked it so much I hooked it up to a 22' monitor to be my main computer. (Still was till last month.) Then I caught an Asus netbook on sale so cheap that I grabbed it to carry around. That piece of crap was so slow that when I accidentally stepped on in and destroyed the screen, my first thought wasn't " Oh my, I just destroyed almost $200. worth of kit," but "I should have done that sooner." I honestly don't know what the difference was between the two machines, but they were day and night in performance. I suspect we'll discover the same with this newest crop (and probably some crap.)

P.S. After I gave the Asus to a buddy who hooked it up to a large screen to run his electronic map program on his boat, I went out and bought a 17" Toshiba laptop so I could actually read my screen without a squint inducing headache. It was a Vista but I learned to live with it because the price was right. Life is a compromise, sigh.

Re: Wouldn't happen in the States ...

"over-estimated the weight of the plane by between 3.5 and 5 tonnes," had me doing the math. 5,000 kg / 87 kids = 57 kg. 87kg -57kg = 30kg. So the average weight per child was estimated to be as little as 30kg? What were they, pygmy pre-schoolers?

it's much hit's much harder to prove where cyber-attacks are coming from

"It's much harder to prove where cyber-attacks are coming from," and that scares me the most. Lord knows how many times in history some force has faked an attack on itself to use a pretext to strike an adversary, but we all know the Nazis did it, and the Americans did it in Vietnam (Gulf of Tonkin). A fake cyber attack is the perfect war monger's tool.

Re: The future is

I also thought such a dual-screen device would be brilliant, so when one came on the market I jumped for it. I'm not saying that the concept is unworkable, but mine was a huge disappointment. Poor responsiveness, feeble wi-fi range and rather lame apps and battery life left me cold. As for waterproofness, when hurricane Katrina finally finished it off, I mourned the money loss, not the tablet. It hadn't been out of its box for months by that time. Good riddance.

Re: The higher the frequency,...

Being a non-tech type, reading this article made me feel their goals were impossible to achieve, although I expect them to succeed eventually.

As for range vs. speed, I wish they would give good range spectrum priority to voice

and whatever spectrum is left over to data. If you want to watch movies, listen to music or work on spreadsheets during your daily commute, download that shit before you walk out the door. And browse Facebook at work like everybody else does. I use my phone as a phone. YMMV

Re: top tip

I was contemplating an iBook a few years ago; heard that they were a college fave because they could survive the backpack life. I coughed up the $800. for a used one and a year later it was in a dumpster, so many things wrong with it, it wasn't worth fixing.

Re: Mark 85, I think the real question is..

And what are YOU, Sabroni, going to do about it? See, that little game can go on ad nauseum. By the way, I'm doing nothing because I firmly believe that neither myself as an individual nor we in our collective millions can stop, slow down or deter anybody from amassing data, simply because knowledge is power. Besides, the only thing I can do is withdraw from the system, get rid of my cell phone, landline, internet connection then computer, bank accounts (with my credit and debit cards), employer, multiple insurance policies, driver's license and vehicle, library card, cable tv, magazine subscriptions, and soon, cash transactions, and finally go live in a hole in the ground. Oh wait, didn't Saddam try that already? We are not little guys to the real power brokers; we are nothing guys. And nothing, that is, zero times x, whether x is one or a billion is still zero.

The old cliche is you can't fight city hall. We know that isn't quite true because some individuals have done just that by expending prodigious amounts of effort and resources. Now multiply that by the size of the national or world stage. The godfathers of this world don't owe us; we owe them and they will never relent on any issue unless it gains them more money or power, not less. You want to live in a different world, go join a commune, but be aware, while you are hiding under your communal rock the rest of the world will keep on turning, and when you emerge blinkingly from under that rock you will only find it even more difficult to suffer the world order.

You can change your own little corner of the world, but unless you want the rest of the world to rain down on your head like some kind of metaphorical Armageddon, you'll have to go along to get along. It all makes me so sad, Sigh.

Re: Applephilia

Applephelia... NOT

As someone who has followed computers with interest all his life, but could not justify their expense

either commercially or personally, it took till 1995 before I obtained my first. It was a used Zenith

laptop, 386 processor, 4MB ram, 84MB hard drive, DOS 3.x os with an added gui of which I can't

remember the name. Disappointingly, all I could do with it was write text notes to myself, and by

osmosis, learn a handful of the most basic DOS navigational commands. I wanted to try programming but

I had no use for it and hated it from the first stroke. DOA

But I kept on buying newer used machines and reading as much as I could and became convinced Apple

was the system for me (and everybody else too). In the mid-2000's I finally scraped the money

together for a used iBook and took the plunge. It sported ver. 10.2. I was thrilled by the quality of

the display and initially loved iTunes, but not for long. The filing systems baffled me, and in spite

of all the claims of intuitiveness, and internet Apple help sites, I was forced to buy a FOR DUMMIES

book. Things only got worse. I had many free programs on my Windows machines that allowed me to tweak

to my heart's content and delight, but forget that with Apple. It was either their way or overpay for multiple

crummy tweak programs that could do only one or two basic things. In frustration I finally coughed up

the money for the highly rated (and expensive) Windows emulation program. It turned out to be so slow

and unstable as to be unusable, (and don't forget, I was only using the most simple and basic of

programs. The Koolaid was wearing off fast and I started falling back on my old Windows machine,

finally only using the iBook to listen to my mp3's. Even that got to be too much and when, after

about a year, the screen failed and the battery wouldn't hold a charge for even five minutes, I

chucked it with relief.

I couldn't even give it away. I was ashamed to even try. I moved on to Win 98SE then XP, and haven't

looked back since.

Sorry for such a long post but I had to get this off my chest after being suckered over a decade ago

by Apple, Steve Jobs and his reality distortion field, and everybody else that drank the Koolaid and

passed in on. It was one of the biggest, and the most expensive mistakes of my impoverished life.

Improbable, not impossible. Drake's equation still holds, although I've begun to have my doubts.

Re: I had a break in Dubai, last year

Of course you wouldn't want to work in Dubai. The place is traditionally highly stratified socially, with their rich upper classes lording over the common workers, while in Britain you could be working for a fraction of Dubai wages while the rich upper classes... oh wait, never mind, it's the climate, right?

Re: take off

I don't think the bulk of their diet was found up on cliffs, so they still probably had to take off occasionally from the water. The only way I see around this is to only feed in waters around cliff bases, then somehow climb the cliff face till they are high enough to launch into a suitable updraft.

Re: How utterly pathetic.

I miss about 20 to 30% of my cell calls because I can't get my phone out of my pocket in time to answer. And more annoying than that, when I immediately call back, about 20 to 30% of those calls go straight to the callers' voice mails. A wrist device might solve my problem but I won't be getting one until my PAYG provider offers one at a reasonable rate, (read CHEAP). It sure as heck won't be an Apple device. I paid $20 for my present feature phone and I don't plan to pay any more for a wrist accessory so I'm not holding my breath since I'll probably be too old and feeble to use it anyway. Sigh.

underhanded gov. policies

Perhaps you should read a little more about underhanded gov. policies conducted by their agencies. People do get hurt, period, end of argument.

Start your reading here...

http://www.npr.org/2012/08/21/159373688/student-subversives-and-the-fbis-dirty-tricks

Re: how about a new term, "Clunts"

Have an up vote from me. Best chuckle I've had in days.

Re: Good or Bad? Gerat!

Have same plan here. Only used 9 minutes of voice over the last 5 months. I have a PAYG TracFone with triple minutes for gabbing. The T-Mobile Nokia 521 Winphone is tethered to my Acer netbook & 22" monitor. You get 5 gigs @ 4g then they throttle you down to 2g (after warning you when you exceed 4 gigs usage) but I've only had that happen once in 5 months, after going on a Youtube BBC Documentary spree, (Iain Stewart is great). My 2 phones together average $45 to $50 per month, tax included. Good or bad? Great for me, a low use consumer.

Re: Guess I'll be the bad guy

If the black man Sam Jones comes into your establishment and causes a disturbance then I can see you banning Sam Jones, not all blacks. If the Uptown Lesbian Society comes into your establishment and causes a disturbance then I can see you banning the Uptown Lesbian Society, not all lesbians, etc. Somehow I can't see you bigots barring all white christian males because one redneck has given you grief in the past.

If every black is disrupting your business and every gender bender too, then I suggest you examine your business practices because your problem is more likely internal than external. Businessman, heal thyself.

Re: When Big Brother Is After You

Although your arithmetic is a little fuzzy to me, I do agree with the thrust of you argument, for that you get an up-vote. I would have liked to hear you address this part too... "...harmed OTHER people in a big way, by stealing, and helping steal their property and life's work, on a massive scale, and through this destroying thousands of jobs and careers, destroying assets legitimately built up..."

Wow, talk about hyperbole.

In case anybody is passing judgement on my presumed digital activities based on my above stand, here I am: 23 years ago a friend and I traded CD collections to copy and archive as remote backups for each. I seldom listened to his stuff, and he mine. Now that collection is virtually mute. Yesterday, for the first time in almost a year, I listened to a half a dozen random songs out of boredom whilst waiting on a Source Forge download over a particularly bad connection.

P.S. Years ago some countries imposed surcharges, or taxes if you will, on CD sales, earmarked for the music industry to reimburse them for lost sales. I am curious as to how that worked out, especially for the artists, and whether such a scheme could work today with torrents and p2p.

Re: What the what?

I up-voted 7 of them.

Re: price cutting? not for everyone

I have a $30/month PAYG plan from T-Mobile. I had to buy their Nokia 921 Windows phone for $100. back in November but I believe they are cheaper now. The $30 plan gets me 100 minutes voice, unlimited texts and unlimited data. The first 5 GB per month are at 4G then when you exceed that they throttle you back to 2G.

Psssss, don't tell anyone but I have it tethered to my 9" Acer notebook running XP, connected to a 22" monitor, all through Bluetooth wifi hardware (Tenda) to a cheap router donated to me by a friend. I can't imagine a much cheaper internet setup, and after 5 months the phone will have paid for itself. The system does fail me quite often, requiring restarts of various components of the systems,(the tether app, the browser Firefox, the Tenda Bluetooth wireless, and sometimes XP itself, no surprise there), but as a semi-retired person living at 1/3 the poverty line, no credit cards, not even a vehicle, I bless T-Mobile for enabling me to get back on the internet after doing for years without.

Re: not necessarily deliberate

Did you not read the article? Google searches don't return such language specific biased results, but Microsoft's Bing does. By identifying myself as a downvoter, I'm probably opening myself up to future retaliatory votes, but hey, have a good day. One downvote for you cap'n.

Re: Have they picked the right tablet

Then it won't fit in a pocket, will it?

Re: Cheating and education

I fully agree with your final statement; it does address only one issue, but I must strongly dispute your time and paper claim. Since you already have to enter the marks into the computer anyway, how much more time does it take to hit the print button? As for the amount of paper, depending on the number of students per class, (we're talking high school here, not university with hundreds per), I'm sure one classes' marks would fit on one, or a maximum of two sheets of paper. Multiply that by the number of classes a teacher has and you still only generate a folder's worth of papers. The only additional time required is that needed to check the marks posted. Any teacher that can't be arsed to do that just affirms my judgement of their laziness, harsh though that judgement might be. Sorry.

Re: HUD?

Son: "Mom, are you watching your speed with your Google Glasses?"

Mom: "Oh son, you're such a tech head. I don't need all that silly driving stuff when I'm only driving you to football practice. I'm watching a new cat video, and you should see the cute boy on a bicycle in it."

Son: "Mom, that's a real boy and you're about to... nooooo!"

Re: Also strike against Microsoft

I know that Google's servers are custom-made, saving them maybe billions. Does anybody know if Lenovo is in the server biz somehow. That tie-in could save Google even more.