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... where you have to hide your email address from harvesters. I respect the privacy of others and am very careful about revealing or publishing email addresses. However, for the decades that I have had an email address, I have never made an attempt to hide it.

Marko <marko@pacujo.net>

1. Overcompression causes ugly pixelization and destroys the HDTV experience. Compression is the snake in the garden of HD-Eden.

2. On the 65" screen, non-HDTV programs have pixels the size of your thumb, and you have to take off your glasses to avoid nausea. Even that won't help with widescreen DVDs that look like Leisure-Suit Larry.

3. Bad lipsynch. You can either watch the beautiful opera muted, or listen to it with eyes closed.

I'm with DirecTV.

I bought this silent computer. It's so nice to have a silent family room.

The machine has lived up to the expectations. However, here are some caveats:

• They don't take credit cards. You have to do an international bank transfer (the distributor is in Australia), which cost me 40USD.
• The computer arrived slightly damaged. Cooling fins in one corner were bent. The damage wasn't functional, though.
• Because of a design flaw (which is being corrected), the computer will barely turn on after weeks of uptime (battery oxidization). You have to keep pushing the power button dozens of times. The unit has a 24-month warranty, and the customer service is prompt. However, you have to send the computer to Germany if it needs fixing.
• To open the computer (should you want to maintain it yourself) you need a tamper-proof Torx T10 screw driver. You won't find those in the hardware store. I ordered mine over the net.
• SuSE 9.0 hangs on the machine once a month or so. I suspect the X server, but other culprit candidates include ReiserFS and the hardware.

Marko

Programmers will love this language. It's the Python of spoken languages!

Programmers will love this language. It's the Python of spoken languages!

The 2nd Amendment (right to carry arms) was originally demanded by the Southern States, who were scared to death of slave rebellions. The 2nd Amendment grants the states the right to have their own paramilitaries to quash local rebellions instead of having to depend on the priorities of the federal troops.

Marko

There's Kurso de Esperanto (A Windows program with multimedia files to help with pronunciation.)

You can also find free online courses (with a tutor via e-mail).

I have bought airline tickets through yahoo in the past. I always created a new user account and forgot about it. So I had no means to go and alter my settings.

I called the yahoo customer service number (408 area code) and waited for fifteen minutes. I explained my business to the representative, and she asked me for my email addresses. I spelled them for her, and she said OK. I knew right away from her tone (and from the fact that she didn't read the email addresses back to me) she really meant "whatever."

And sure enough a few days later I received this email that adviced me about yahoo's changing marketing practices. The most important piece of information was a URL I was supposed to follow if the account wasn't mine!

So I follow the link. The web server asked if I was sure, and I replied sure I was sure.

That hopefully did it.

Marko

Does the VAIO use an AMD CPU? If so, look up lvcool.

Last time I checked, though, lvcool had a critical race condition that locked up the machine after a few minutes. I have fixed this race condition, so mail me if you're interested.

Marko

I don't think the problem is in the backbone. It's at the edge. Do all applications (emacs, gnus, mozilla, ssh, flash, real et al) and servers (apache, oracle, innd, sendmail et al) know how to deal with IPv6?

In my work, I've written a lot of IPv4 clients and servers, and none of them support IPv6 addresses.

Marko

I think so too. The temptation just was too great:

• He didn't want the shame of losing everything.
  
• He wanted to have some money to start over with.
  
• He wanted to protect his wife from shady creditors and physical harm.
  

The last reason may be why the wife so emphatically denounces her husband. If the creditors believe the husband doesn't care for her, they might spare her life.

Still, it's going to be difficult to start over with a measley $250k without a social security number and a driver's license. He will be needing help from his (ex-)wife. You see, your ability to work is easily worth a million dollars (= your annual income divided by the interest rate).

Marko

That would be the ultimate fuel cell.

Absolutely no emissions.

Marko

English is not widely used or known in Asia. And engineers are notorious for bad language skills.

Try Korean next time.

Marko

How can Linux achieve low-latency as long as it allows the drivers to spin in udelay calls? I'm just investigating some driver code that essentially spins indefinitely while it's waiting for the hardware to respond to a command.

The loops I'm looking at are limited to a millisecond, wherafter the driver gives up and returns -EIO, but that millisecond could be an expensive worst case.

The only practical way to guarantee low latency is to go RT Linux. Thing is, in a realtime system you design the whole system at once. Linux is general-purpose and open-ended; you can just keep on adding drivers, and nobody can guarantee the worst-case timings.

Marko

It's not cool to force a mission on the people who are born along the way. In fact, it's probably wrong to even give birth to babies along the way, unless it is already known that the environment can sustain a healthy society.

At the very least, they should study the sociological dynamics for a few generations on a low orbit where the mission can be aborted if need be.

Marko

Set the mail server up so it only accepts email messages whose contents begin with this sentence:

I will pay you $500.00 for each unsolicited commercial email message I send you.

All other messages will be bounced automatically with the instructions how to get your messages accepted.

I intend to implement just this scheme.

Marko