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I cut out the relevant question and put it up here, so you can judge for yourself, but I think the context and quote are pretty clear. In referring to the VT datacenter, he says: "They've configured one corner of that - umm - I think there are about 6 to 8 racks or maybe more with all of these machines standing on them." He may be somewhat removed from the minute details of the project, but if he was off by over a full magnitude of order, why would he throw out any number? And he is definitely saying "6 ta 8", not "6ti 8", "6 ti 8", or even "6ta 8".
BTW, in the archive files, the relevant quote is at 1:23:55, with the question starting at 1:23:40.

A rack is 43U.
A standard rack is 43U. Just after the quote above, at about 1:25, he mentions that Liebert custom built racks for them. And given that they are accommodating desktop chassis, I doubt they are using a design based on a standard rack (especially with regards to footprint).

But I guess we'll see when the pictures come up. I must admit, it was one of the odder things he said and I had to listen to it several times to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding. It has my curiosity piqued.

Was the one that got into my iBook and died! That lovely, translucent shell is perfect for showcasing creepy crawlies. Ewww.

If you're slutty enough, you can get a G5 now.

I must have mis-spelt a HREF tag on that post - it's Address Book, located here that lets you do the SMSing and dialling, etc.

While I'm at it, I guess it would be pretty hard not to mention Salling Clicker, the most awesome little Bluetooth app I've seen. You can effectively control your mac through your phone because of this - it can run scripts to do all kinds of stuff, from presentations to controlling iTunes and DVD player. You can create more scripts through AppleScript too. The sky is the limit! :)

-- james

I just ran one of my old essays through it. All hundreds, except the creative, just like many others. Considering this was mainly a creative essay, what gives?

...can be found here.

Tell an Australian that a person from any one of these three sub-cultures stole something, they'll instantly believe you.

Thanks for generalizing every Australian as a racist. Oh yes. All Australians are like that. Moron.

Generalize something derrogatory about Australians, and James A. (hype7 (239530)) will instantly believe you. Send your Australian jokes to James A.

If it's gonna be that kinda party I'm gonna stick my dick is somebody's potato.

Instead of broadcasting brain-rotting television, you should be saturating your radio waves with this.

I would tag "The G5 Chick."

I wish they made more Mac games.

Why leave America when we have computers like this?

Yowzers!

You're visually impaired? That's too bad, because then you can't look at this.

Yowzers!

Interesting stuff in this thread. If you read closely, technically, what he's doing is perfectly legal and covered under section 3 (transfer) of the Itunes license you posted since no other contract is covering transfer issues.

I copied the iTunes User Agreement.
It's available in PDF and TXT for your enjoyment.
I haven't read it over yet... but I bet this guy is just asking for trouble.

I copied the iTunes User Agreement.
It's available in PDF and TXT for your enjoyment.
I haven't read it over yet... but I bet this guy is just asking for trouble.

I'd love to see the arguments for the different platforms!

I think the argument for G5 came from here.

Didn't they make the "Deer Hunter" games for those people?

no, iraq attack is for those people :-)

For the uninformed, it's a side-scrolling chopper game where you ..uh... fly over iraq and bomb... uh.. everything.

in fact all you do is sidescroll and drop bombs nonstop since ammo is unlimited.

I still remember that game from 15 years go when I was playing it and my dad stood besides me shaking his head 'but what's the fun in that' ?

me looking at him 'duh ? fun ? now that you mention it...'

It was one of those games where you just couldn't stop yourself from continuing, even if you could do it with your eyes closed.

w/r/t needing to spend an extra grand - you're referring to Final Cut Pro, I presume; also check out Final Cut Express (~$250 or free [beer] if you can dig up a Premiere install disc somewhere). FCExpress works with widescreen aspect ratios.

Soon enough we will have foldable cameras, how cool would that be to fold up a camera and slip it in your pocket?

Folding pocket cameras? Old hat!

I'm not saying you wouldn't need a big pocket, though.

Read the following article: Tech Job p1 and Tech Job p2. It is definately a good read.

Read the following article: Tech Job p1 and Tech Job p2. It is definately a good read.

http://homepage.mac.com/michael2k/FileSharing9.htm l

I see a lot of posts asking why Applescript is useful. Here's one good reason. Salling Clicker. If you have a bluetooth phone and a mac you can write scripts to do just about anything. The sample ones will control iTunes and the DVD player. I have seen scripts for automatic away messages in iChat when you leave bluetooth range. Some people even use it to control presentations. Check it out it's pretty cool.

If you're a fan of Risk, check out iConquer, which is a bit more full featured, has lots of plugins to add extensibility, and is cheaper than Lux.

I'm thoroughly addicted at this point :)

Someone needs to inform THESE guys of those statistics...

Any ideas?

apparently you haven't been to SF/PRB*/Oakland lately. There are a number of stencils that have been spraypainted on local sidewalks and buildings lately- not so much in the last month or two, but lots and lots of new ones kept popping up before our prezidictator launched his little profit-sharing venture in Iraq.

some of the more memorable ones read:

RESIST PATRIOTISM

and another is
If America wants a war, let it be a revolution!

So, there's at least one guy with a can of spraypaint that is ready for some new leadership. and there's another guy with a website. So if by "approximately zero" you mean "nowhere except in california, and they're all nut jobs anyway" you might be right. But I think everone in the Terminator state would welcome a little regieme change on the other coast right now.

*oh, PRB == People's Republic of Berkeley

All you need is to imagine a Beowulf cluster of...

Waitaminute!

You actually could think of this as a Beowulf cluster! The main twist is that each node in the network is being used interactively, rather than just acting as a slave that churns away on data chunks autonomously.

You don't state what kind of systems your colleagues are using, but if you're using Macs, then Rendezvous mDNS networking can take care of the "plumbing" part of the problem for you -- everyone can instantly start publishing their shared resources, and the trick then is to just figure out a way to search who has what content.

The search function could be done from a machine set up to automatically spider everyone's content & basically set up a little in-house search engine, with links back to each user's version of "http://johndoe.local/weather/data/2003/08/21/1530 _nws" or whatever.

If you're not running Macs, well that's a problem on several levels :), but the mDNS spec is an open standard, and it is IIRC available as an Apache module. There's mod_rendezvous , but it seems to have stalled with an OSX version only -- porting to Linux shouldn't be bad but is left as an exercise for the reader. There also seems to be the Net::MDNS::Server & Net::MDNS::Client Perl modules on CPAN, but they seem to have been born & stalled in the same week back in June. Not sure what that means.

In any case, if you can set up a spontaneous mDNS network, then that would solve the problem of getting every node on your network to be able to advertise what resources are available to other nodes on the network. The step after that is to set up a search interface, and that's really a solved problem -- any Perl hacker comfortable with LWP should be able to whip up a reasonably good search mechanism using &/or extending existing tools.

If you manage to get this to work, it would be interesting to read a writeup of how the lego parts end up being assembled :-)

...and ye shall receive:

http://homepage.mac.com/patgaddis/calvinpissingons co.gif

Another Risk clone is iConquer, also built for Mac OS X. It's highly addictive in multiplayer mode.

AFAIK you still need an AOLIM account for chatting outside of your LAN

They also give you 6 months free .Mac trial membership, but the iChat name will last past that.

There's an excellent source of information about what "three primary colors" actually means at of Dave Trapp's Sequim (WA) Schools science department site. There's a relatively simple explanation of how color vision works, then a facinating and highly detailed in-depth discussion of the issue.

Some interesting notes from Mr. Trapp:

* "All three [signals] are equally sensitive to blue light, two have expanded ranges that include green and yellow light, and the third signal includes sensitivity to red light."

* "While these paradigms of primary colors have worked well for human printing and light uses for over a century, it is likely that the three primary colors are not descriptive of the world, but rather an artifact of our eyes, the tools we use to perceive the world."

* "The real world does not have primary colors!"

He also discusses how the world would be perceived differently if we evolved a fourth cone, sensitive in the UV region. Very cool stuff!

Interestingly, though, he's no longer teaching science, and details the reasons on his site. Anyone who's ever been driven crazy in a class taught by a guy named simply "Coach" (and who on this site hasn't?) will sympathize with this good teacher's plight.

There's an excellent source of information about what "three primary colors" actually means at of Dave Trapp's Sequim (WA) Schools science department site. There's a relatively simple explanation of how color vision works, then a facinating and highly detailed in-depth discussion of the issue.

Some interesting notes from Mr. Trapp:

* "All three [signals] are equally sensitive to blue light, two have expanded ranges that include green and yellow light, and the third signal includes sensitivity to red light."

* "While these paradigms of primary colors have worked well for human printing and light uses for over a century, it is likely that the three primary colors are not descriptive of the world, but rather an artifact of our eyes, the tools we use to perceive the world."

* "The real world does not have primary colors!"

He also discusses how the world would be perceived differently if we evolved a fourth cone, sensitive in the UV region. Very cool stuff!

Interestingly, though, he's no longer teaching science, and details the reasons on his site. Anyone who's ever been driven crazy in a class taught by a guy named simply "Coach" (and who on this site hasn't?) will sympathize with this good teacher's plight.

There's an excellent source of information about what "three primary colors" actually means at of Dave Trapp's Sequim (WA) Schools science department site. There's a relatively simple explanation of how color vision works, then a facinating and highly detailed in-depth discussion of the issue.

Some interesting notes from Mr. Trapp:

* "All three [signals] are equally sensitive to blue light, two have expanded ranges that include green and yellow light, and the third signal includes sensitivity to red light."

* "While these paradigms of primary colors have worked well for human printing and light uses for over a century, it is likely that the three primary colors are not descriptive of the world, but rather an artifact of our eyes, the tools we use to perceive the world."

* "The real world does not have primary colors!"

He also discusses how the world would be perceived differently if we evolved a fourth cone, sensitive in the UV region. Very cool stuff!

Interestingly, though, he's no longer teaching science, and details the reasons on his site. Anyone who's ever been driven crazy in a class taught by a guy named simply "Coach" (and who on this site hasn't?) will sympathize with this good teacher's plight.

There's an excellent source of information about what "three primary colors" actually means at of Dave Trapp's Sequim (WA) Schools science department site. There's a relatively simple explanation of how color vision works, then a facinating and highly detailed in-depth discussion of the issue.

Some interesting notes from Mr. Trapp:

* "All three [signals] are equally sensitive to blue light, two have expanded ranges that include green and yellow light, and the third signal includes sensitivity to red light."

* "While these paradigms of primary colors have worked well for human printing and light uses for over a century, it is likely that the three primary colors are not descriptive of the world, but rather an artifact of our eyes, the tools we use to perceive the world."

* "The real world does not have primary colors!"

He also discusses how the world would be perceived differently if we evolved a fourth cone, sensitive in the UV region. Very cool stuff!

Interestingly, though, he's no longer teaching science, and details the reasons on his site. Anyone who's ever been driven crazy in a class taught by a guy named simply "Coach" (and who on this site hasn't?) will sympathize with this good teacher's plight.

This proposal reminds me of Asimov's short story Sha Guido G in which the main character "saves humanity from oppression by overtaxing the generators of the flying capital city, crashing it to the ground and killing everyone on board".

Seriously, it looks like the incentives to a potential terrorist of a successful attack on a worldwide power grid would be tremendous, so the security should be the very first priority. Which never is, of course.

Design your entire home from the ground up and test it for paper-airplane-friendliness!

I'd highly recommend Canvas from ACD Systems (formerly Deneba Software). It's a mite expensive (~$350) but it excels at doing technical drawings/illustration particularly to scale. I've been using Canvas for doing starship deckplans for the Traveller game, and I can set the scale to be 1 X to be 1 Y and then have all of my drawings/measurements displayed in the Y units.

Canvas is pretty easy to learn though it has its quirks. On the plus side, while it is geared towards technical illustration, it's also a general purpose graphics package that can handle bitmap editing (subset of Photoshop functionality, and some photoshop filters work with Canvas), light page layout, and flow charting. Canvas imports and exports a wide variety of formats. I couldn't live without it for my work (user interface design).

There is a free 15 (I think it's 15) day trial version available.

I see this project as a competitor to shrink wrapped search engines. IE google appliance or maybe even Folio based products. Typically corporations have many documents that need to be indexed and searchable to their needs.

I believe with Macs you can control iTunes with the phone (sounds cool) and others are working on getting Winzip to function.

I believe with Macs you can control iTunes with the phone (sounds cool) and others are working on getting Winzip to function.

I have a similar, but less mature product than you. In fact I'm doing something that replicates a lot of your functionality and will ultimiately replicate most of what you do (hah ;P ).

http://freshmeat.net/projects/tasklist/?topic_id=1 015

You project seems not only more mature than mine, but more powerful too (I had functionality like sub-tasks in the previous version, but I have chosen to re-impliment them to allow for a more flexible product in the long term, I wish to adapt the software to be used as a call tracking & bug tracking tool in future, as well as a trouble ticket system).

IMO, I'd say the biggest hurdles for your project probably are:

a) The interface.

b) The J2EE dependancy.

The Interface:

I think your interface is definately not the worst I've ever seen, but it's not very slick or easy to use. For some reason this doesn't seem to hurt programs like Remedy, but I think in the long run, it will. I think ~90% of similar software suffers from this problem. Represending complext functionality with a simple and easy to use interface on the web is hard, because you have to rely on coding your own rotines to emulate things like 'tab like' functionality (because most of us do not want to resort to frames, though I find it can be nice to use iFrames if avalible).

I'd be very happy to help you with your interface if you like? I'm no Java wizard, but I have been using Java on and off since 1998 and I know some pretty funky ways of doing neat stuff in HTML (take a look at my app if you like ;) which I think could be useful. Email me at iain_collins@mac.com if you'd like to discuss it (or if you want some code to rip off :)!

The J2EE dependancy:

While I think this would not be a hurdle for an established killer app, I think it could stop some users. There are a lot of task list style apps out there, most of them are half baked (a bit like mine:) but this means people will flit from project to project and only devote a small amount of time to each application.

If users have to install J2EE to run your software then they need to be sold on the idea that it's worth the hassle of all that clicking/typing to install (users are lazy, of course), and they will deduct the time/hassle it takes to install J2EE from your project (which can count against you). Now I'm very much in favor of Java, but I think that's true, and worth mentioning. :)

I think having a working and reponsive demo site helps work past a lot of the negative aspects of needing to install J2EE, but I think the more you can sell your product on the site as a 'professional' product with a 'quality' feel the better you are to combat this :).

Good luck with your project btw, and get in touch if you'd like to work on the UI!

The author of a Mac game called Glider worked for a company called Casady & Greene. He seems to believe that since the company went bankrupt, the rights have reverted back to him as the author.

I guess this would hold true so long as they didn't sell or assign the rights elsewhere.

Even then, regardless of the answer, you can still be taken to court and it will be up to a judge.

Cocoa models undo like this: Do is a transaction. Undo is a compensating transaction that performs the inverse of do. Multiple undo/redo is a pair of stacks of such transactions.

If you help the developers to improve the document-view-controller structure and abstract changes to the document into transactions, you're one step closer to implementing undo.

Yes, but all bets are off with Leonard Nimoy singing The Ballad of Bilbo Baggin

A qaint remark made on the BS7 post about Shakespeare being the definitive resource for characterisation. Could Asimov also be considered a resource for ideas on science, thinking and learning?

Consider the plot for Profession . This story outlines a similiar observation mentioned above. Where,

...In a world where education is managed by two imprintings by a machine--the first at eight to learn how to read and the second a decade later, to imprint additional knowledge one needs for one's ideal career--George Platen finds himself in the unenviable category of one of the few whom the machine cannot educate. ...

[Isimov.I., Profession, 1957 (republished - Nine Tomorrows) - information compiled by John Jenkins]

A qaint remark made on the BS7 post about Shakespeare being the definitive resource for characterisation. Could Asimov also be considered a resource for ideas on science, thinking and learning?

Consider the plot for Profession . This story outlines a similiar observation mentioned above. Where,

...In a world where education is managed by two imprintings by a machine--the first at eight to learn how to read and the second a decade later, to imprint additional knowledge one needs for one's ideal career--George Platen finds himself in the unenviable category of one of the few whom the machine cannot educate. ...

[Isimov.I., Profession, 1957 (republished - Nine Tomorrows) - information compiled by John Jenkins]

...why not use a timer program on the computer that will pop up something on your screen...

There is a simple program for OS X called EggTimer that you may want to try if you are lucky enough to own a mac. :) Otherwise, I'm sure this isn't the only such project out there. Personally, I prefer an actual physical one timer.

I use an analog dial timer with a quartz movement. the digital type take too long to set and the dial type that run without batteries make a loud rattling noise while they're running.. The one I use has a long alarm so that it's still bugging me if I don't pay attention to it immediately.

My egg-timer with a dial is very very easy to set and it doesn't require me to switch programs to turn the dial again. I can do it with just one glance and one ajustment of the dial. It's all about the workflow efficiency.

Anything more complicated than this and I tend not to reset the thing, thinking I'll do it in "just a moment." Those moments can grow to a very long time without a timer set to interrupt (that's the whole point of the timer).