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Ask Slashdot: What To Do With a Math Degree? 416

Posted by timothy
from the how-many-ply? dept.

Comment: Re:Scroll Lock! (Score 4, Informative) 154

by conares (#37069724) Attached to: Review of IBM's Original Personal Computer
From Wikipedia:

The Scroll Lock key was meant to lock all scrolling techniques, and is a remnant from the original IBM PC keyboard, though it is not used by most modern-day software. In the original design, Scroll Lock was intended to modify the behavior of the arrow keys. When the Scroll Lock mode was on, the arrow keys would scroll the contents of a text window instead of moving the cursor. In this usage, Scroll Lock is a toggling lock key like Num Lock or Caps Lock, which have a state that persists after the key is released.

Comment: Re:Usual "asking legal advice on Slashdot" post (Score 1) 519

by conares (#36937398) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Dealing With the Business Software Alliance?

Another case that I'm aware of involved an agreement that a couple made with them years ago, and the IRS recently came back and said, "the agent who made that agreement didn't have the authority to do it.

OK, I'm not a lawyer or anything but.... Doesn't that make it basically impossible to make a contract with anyone? If you at any moment can pop up and say "that guy wasn't allowed to do that"? And that goes for anything that qualifies for a contract, even the receipt you get when shop for groceries. Unless of course the contract in-it-self is illegal.

Comment: Re:online games (Score 2) 291

by conares (#36692568) Attached to: Sony Introduces 'PSN Pass' To Fight Used Game Sales
Most games AFAIK the gamers them selves pay for the online services. TF2 or basically any other Valve game are always on dedicated servers (are there official servers that Valve pay for?). BF:BC2 also, MW2 has that fuckup one player has to host. Someone is definitely paying for online services, but its not the makers of the games.

Comment: Re:Same with 1080p (Score 0) 666

by conares (#36221528) Attached to: Users Want Matte LCDs While Glossy Screens Dominate
wow wow wow... hold your horses there fella! Before you that far you gotta take a college course in software patents and why they're bad. And then install the right codecs. And dont even think about cheating and just downloading vlc, you can bet your ass we crippled that fucker before he was even born!!!

I dont belive in karma
The Almighty Buck

The Rules of Thumb For Tech Purchasing 401

Posted by timothy
from the kevin-kelly-always-has-brain-candy dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Sam Grobart writes in the NYT that buying gadgets can sometimes be like buying a car; it requires sorting through options because the reality is that most of us are usually dealing with a finite amount of money to spend, and that means making trade-offs. Grobart puts forward his set of rules for getting the most for your tech dollar when buying computers, cameras, cellphones, data plans, and service contracts. For example, Rule No. 1: pay for PC memory, not speed. 'When buying and configuring a new computer, companies often give the option of upgrading the processor and adding more memory, or RAM. If it is an either/or proposition, go for the RAM,' writes Grobart. 'Processors are usually fast enough for most people; it is the RAM that can be the bottleneck.' Other rules include 'Pay for the messaging, not the minutes,' 'Pay for the components, not the cables,' 'Pay for the sensor size, not the megapixels,' and 'Pay for the TV size, not the refresh rate.' Kevin Kelly expands on Grobart's rules of thumb with 'Pay for the glass, not the shutters,' 'Pay for reliability, not mileage,' and 'Pay for comfort, not for weight.' Any others?"

Comment: Re:Meh (Score 0) 387

by conares (#36131582) Attached to: Confessions of a Computer Repairman

3: Basic honesty. For almost all home users, MSE is good enough. Getting a commercial AV solution is pointless because most infections end up being 0-day variants that AV products will not catch. Instead, educating the end user on Adblock and sandboxie will go a lot further to prevent calls in the future about infected machines. The $50-$100 that a user would spend on an AV solution can go for an external hard drive (which actually has a tangible benefit to the user) for nightly backups.

And that's the reason why there are very few real "PC repair professional"... Free (price not GNU) AV software DOESNT PUT FOOD ON THE TABLE!

4: Common sense.

This, there is also very little of. But unlike free AV software, the lack of common sense does put food on the table.

Comment: Re:Adaption... (Score 0) 328

by conares (#35920598) Attached to: German Company To Install Linux On 10,000 PCs
No one but geeks use the OS, the rest use applications. The bottom line is no matter what OS you're going to be clicking stuff on screen in one way or the other, that's easy. And you're going to be inputting data in one way or the other, depending on the application that can be harder. Keyboards are easy to use if you're used one before same goes for mice. The biggest questions usually are 'will my documents that I've created in X work in Z?', and if not ' how can I make them work?'. By switching the company is probably saving somewhere between 500K-1M€ per year in licensing costs. Maintenance and support costs probably wont change much.

When you go out to buy, don't show your silver.