Mainly because I have files on my current Mac (a Dual 1 GHz G4) that were present on my Mac Plus hard drive when it crashed in 1991, and they read:
Dec. 31, 1903, 6:00 PM
Which may be the default for the Central time zone.
Do I really need those files anymore? Well sure! Some of them are old entries for the Bulwer Lytton Contest, and you never know when I'll have enough to collect for section of a short story collection. Plus, you know that as soon as I throw away a file, I'll need it the next day. That's just how things work.
This is one of the many, many reasons why I've gone from a 60 Meg to a 60 Gig hard drive.;-)
I know you're worried about your post-SCO job prospects, but fear not! Thanks to today's robust economy, you too can find gainful employment! All you have to do is memorize the following phrase:
"Do you want fries with that?"
By memorizing those six little words, a host of of job opportunities will open up for you at numerous local offices of several Fortune 500 companies! What's more, you'll be in an industry entirely ignorant of SCO's mephetic stench of evil! In fact, your high tech background will help qualify you to operate a sophisticated computerized order tracking system!
So don't dispair! A new job awaits you serving the public better than you ever did at SCO!
Now this P4 is so fast that you can get a Windows Blue Screen of Death within seconds of booting it up!
Watch it still lose to a Dual G5 in Photoshop bakeoffs.
Check out this line from Page 11: " At this clock rate, however, benchmark tests were no longer possible." In other words, this overclocked beauty doesn't actually work at that speed! If it's too unstable to use for real software, it hardly counts as a real innovation.
He wrote the outline for the first Tek book, then turned all the writing chores over to Ron Goulart. (I believe that someone eventually replaced Goulart as Shatner's ghostwriter as well.)
Question 1: Do you think Microsoft should be:
A. More evil
B. Less evil
C. Microsoft is just the right amount of evil right now.
Question 2: Concerning how much the next version of Windows should steal from Macintosh OS 10.3, Windows should:
A. Steal more from Apple
B. Steal a lot more from Apple
C. Still every single element of OS 10.3
D. The current crappy, half-assed ripoff of OS X is currently sufficient for all my computing needs.
Question 3: Next year, how many Windows-specific viruses would you like to receive in e-mail:
A. The same amount as now
B. More
C. A whole lot more
D. I have a Windows box still sending out copies of SoBig at this very moment.
Question 4: How large would you like the next Windows security hole to be?
A. Large enough to accommodate a small dog.
B. Large enough to drive an SUV through.
C. Large enough to drive a Mack truck through.
D. You know that huge crawler thing NASA uses to take the space shuttle out to the pad? Yeah, that big.
Question 5: C'mon, be serious. How much for your soul?
A. Already sold mine.
B. An Xbox with the complete library of available games.
C. 10000 shares of Microsoft stock.
D. Natalie Portman
E. CowboyNeal
I installed all the latest Apple updates, including Quicktime 6.5, just before installing a copy of Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. The game seems to play OK, but the cinematic cutscreens are all screwed up, playing in overlapping tiles rather than fullscreen.
The vitals: Duel 1 GHz PowerMac G4, 768 MB, Radeon 9000, 10.3.2 and all the latest and greatest.
Anyone else seen this problem?
Debunking Krugman's Voting Machine Column
on
Cringley on E-voting
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
NOT more frequent, and Republicans didn't start it
on
Gerrymandering by Computer
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"The reason it's been in the news so much lately is a couple of Republican-controlled state legislatures (Texas, most notably) have escalated the process and begun redistricting more frequently."
This is a lie. Texas did not begin "redistricting more frequently." The Texas congressional Democrats blocked redistricting following the 2000 census, leading to court-ordered redistricting. However, the Texas Constitution specifies that redstricting must be done by congress. In calling a special session for the purpose of redistricting, Governor Perry and the legislature was following the Texas Constitution. To omit this fact is to commit manifest dishonesty for the sake of partisan politics.
In that session, Republican did press their advantage to gerrymander Texas congressional districts, just as the Democrats had done every decade they were in charge of Texas. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, and to the victor goes the spoils. There are many things to dislike about gerrymandering, but the Supreme Court has ruled that it is prefectly legal and constitutional as long as its not done for the purpose of racial discrimination. Moreover, the new districts more accurately reflect the voting preferences of Texans as a whole.
Moreover, since when does a slanted piece by an unabashed liberal partisan complaining about the political opposition actually qualify as "stuff that matters"? Oh wait, this is Slashdot, and anything vaguely tech-related that bashes Bush or Republicans gets listed...
Why? Because Apple currently dominates both online music services AND digital music players. The more firms jumping into the fray, the less any single one of Apple's competitors stand out. Moreover, given that Apple's DRM is considerably less heinous than the those of the other firms, that it has better software, and integration with the market-leading MP3 player, it becomes a matter of "I could carefully compare these 7 or 8 other online services, popping up like dot-bomb zombie clones, all of whom have exactly the same price, and try to figure out which is best AND will still be in business five years from now...or I could just go with iTunes as both the cool AND obvious choice." If Apple had two or three strong competitors, it might be different, but seven or eight weak ones just make iTunes look that much more attractive by comparison.
My prediction: The iTunes Music Store will still be going string five years from now, but all but one or two of other digital music stores will be gone.
I've long thought that there needs to be some sort of automated "attack the spammer" bot that could be used for such purposes.
Such a thing might work like this:
Someone builds a parsing engine like Spamcop's to extract the spam-reply e-mail address from the pink gooey mass.
You set it up so vetted (and possibly paying) customers/spam recievers/victims can send it to the parsing engine.
The engine: A.) Extracts the e-mail address, B.) Uses a parsing script to write a reply with several questions ("I am very interested in your penis enlarger. Can you tell me how many pills are in a bottle? How does the guarantee work? Are there any other side effects? What are the pills made of? Are they FDA approved? What other pills should I not take with them?" etc. etc. (I suspect you could fairly quickly write a set of 10-20 scripts which would cover 95% of the spam being sent today.)
It creates a unique e-mail address to a neutral-sounding domain (or one of several), like geditkita.com, spluuur.net, etc.) to use as the reply to address.
This e-mail address automatically goes back to the parsing engine, at which point it goes to a second-level reply script. ("What color are the pills? Are they safe for cats? Are they legal to resell in Ann Arbor? Will I still be able to play the piano?" etc.)
Repeat as necessary.
This could quickly eat up a very large amount of spammer time. And anyone who spams that address in the future alos gets feed into the bot loop!
Any here think they're capable of setting something like that up?
This is like one of those newspaper stories that procliams COMMANDER TACO A MURDERER! on the front page in 48 point type, and then three days later there's a little correction in a box at the bottom of the last column on A-42 that reads "the story about Commander Taco being a murderer on the front page of Tuesdays Daily Slasher was in error. Another man named Commander Taco was convicted of penguin murder in American Samoa in 1969. The Slasher regrets the error."
Or, to bring the point home more closely to the topic at hand, it's like when Homer got slimmed for Sexual Harassment by a TV tabloid, when all he really did was peel the gummy Venus DeMillo off his companion's ass, then when the station issued an apology, they ran it as one of hundreds flashing by on the screen at the end of the program.
I guess Slashdot just isn't willing to admit that their dislike of Fox News lead them to post a false story, and now prevents them from posting a correction anywhere "above the virtual fold" for casual viewers to see without having to click the link...
I suppose many Slashdotters are too young to remember UNESCO's scheme to "license" and "regulate" journalism in all countries. This is why Ronald Reagam quite rightly pulled all U.S. funding from UNESCO until they reformed.
The UN is an organization that does things like putting Libya in charge of its commission on human rights. Do you really want North Korea or Communist China to have a say in what YOU can or can't read online?
The UN is in no way, shape or form dedicated to the idea of democracy and individual rights. It is an organization by and for bureaucratic elites looking to expand their power and pretiege and ensure themselves easy employment. It has no moral standing, and only the power that is allowed it by the Security Council. It is not now, nor will it ever be, a "World Government," and thank God for that.
There are very few nations in the world that have a guaranteed right to free speech and a free press the way the U.S. does. (In France it's illegal to "insult the dignity" of the French President.) Putting the UN in chaarge of the Internet would be an unmittigated disaster for freedom.
I'm waiting for Crow, Tom Servo, R2D2 and Bender to form a robot Supergroup, The Shiny Metal Ass Experience. THAT I'll go see. I mean, how do we know if any of the robots here are any good if we haven't seen them in previous groups or solo projects? (Not to mention Alan Parsons Projects.)
> The critics hated "Citizen Kane", "It's a Wonderful Life" and "Star Wars" at the time.
I call BS. Star Wars had a two page review (along with a cover corner teaser) in Time magazine calling it "THE BEST FILM OF THE YEAR" when it came out. I'm sure there were some critics who hated Star Wars, but it was by no means a universal or even majority opinion.
The submitter had to mention Escape from L.A, bringing back a trauma I had successfully surpressed for many years. I saw it in a theater, for free at a preview screening, and still felt ripped off. I want those two hours of my life back! What an enormous waste of talent for everyone involved. I was hoping for the guilty, trashy fun of Escape From New York. Nope. It was just sad, limp and stupid. You've heard of straight to DVD? Escape from LA should have been straight to Mystery Science Theater 3000. A really crummy movie...
Which is more evil, hiddenagenda.com or www.hiddenagenda.org? The game designers seek to design games in which imaginary people are killed; Hidden Agenda the band write songs in which both real and imaginary people are killed. Advantage: Hidden Agenda.org.
Take a look at this. The United States has not one power grid, but three (the actual article cites this, but it hasn't been emphasized enough):
"It is important to note that there is no "national power grid" in the
United States. In fact, the continental United States is divided into three main power grids:
The Eastern Interconnected System, or the Eastern Interconnect
The Western Interconnected System, or the Western Interconnect
The Texas Interconnected System, or the Texas Interconnect
People who actually know what they're talking about point out the problem is not deregulation, but botched deregulation (California is a particularly stark example of what happens when one side of the supply/demand equation is deregulated, and the other isn't) combined with short-sighted environmental laws and other legal and regulatory issues that make it difficult to build new transmission lines profitably (NIMBY lawsuits, bogus "power line cancer" junk science, etc.). What the energy market needs is better deregulation combined with tort reform and a willingness for Washington to step in and break deadlocks where new capacity is urgently needed. Vice President Dick Chaney's energy task force outlined the problem way back in 2001, but nothing has been done since. Unless something is done, expect more blacouts (at least outside of Texas).
I don't see what the big deal about Napster is! For the past half-hour I've been trying to download a 17 Megabyte song (Anonymous Troll's "Macintosh Harddrive Transfer Blues"), and it's taking forever on my 56K modem! On iTunes, the same transfer only takes 3 minutes!
This is just another example of the Napster zelots promoting a more expensive, propritary technology that doesn't even include a three-button mouse...
/Sarcasm
Waiting for the first TV Virus
on
TV's Tipping Point
·
· Score: 4, Funny
As TV continues to make the move toward pure digital information, how long will it be before we see the first TV-specific virus corrupting dowloaded shows?
"Honey, when did they add the Goatsex guy to the cast of Friends?"
O'Connor might not be a household name, but he's started several businesses that have achieved recent notoriety: Flexplay, which makes DVDs that become unusable after a certain period of time, and DoubleClick.
So, Mr. O'Conner's claim to fame is "innovating" things that treat consumers like idiots and annoy the hell out of the rest of us. What, have the guys who invented Muzak, the CueCat and penis enlarger pills not written any books yet?
All other things being equal, I think I would prefer to read a business book by someone who invented something of lasting value rather than the creator of annoying, disposable crap.
"The two devices are targeted at different markets: whereas the iPod is obviously meant to appeal to consumers with an appreciation for engineering, design, and style, the Digital Jukebox is for sewer-dwelling CHUDs with a taste for human flesh."
If both Dell and Microsoft are going to come up with their own "let's rip off Apple" music service, that means the two of them will be competing with each other. Oddly enough, Microsoft doesn't seem to like it when customers compete with them. And let's face it, a Dell/Microsoft split rift would be an annoyance for Microsoft, but a DISASTER for Dell.
If I weren't so convinced that both of them were going to release DRM-crippled, dead-on-arrival, inelegent and unwieldy abortions in trying to ripoff iTunes, I'd say this has the potential to be interesting. As it is, I suspect both services will be dead (and iTunes still doing very well indeed) by mid-2005 or so...
Slashdot Mirror
Dec. 31, 1903, 6:00 PM
Which may be the default for the Central time zone.
Do I really need those files anymore? Well sure! Some of them are old entries for the Bulwer Lytton Contest, and you never know when I'll have enough to collect for section of a short story collection. Plus, you know that as soon as I throw away a file, I'll need it the next day. That's just how things work.
This is one of the many, many reasons why I've gone from a 60 Meg to a 60 Gig hard drive. ;-)
I know you're worried about your post-SCO job prospects, but fear not! Thanks to today's robust economy, you too can find gainful employment! All you have to do is memorize the following phrase:
"Do you want fries with that?"
By memorizing those six little words, a host of of job opportunities will open up for you at numerous local offices of several Fortune 500 companies! What's more, you'll be in an industry entirely ignorant of SCO's mephetic stench of evil! In fact, your high tech background will help qualify you to operate a sophisticated computerized order tracking system!
So don't dispair! A new job awaits you serving the public better than you ever did at SCO!
If you're interested in slightly more detailed descriptions of what I've read this year, you can check out my reading diary.
A. More evil
B. Less evil
C. Microsoft is just the right amount of evil right now.
Question 2: Concerning how much the next version of Windows should steal from Macintosh OS 10.3, Windows should:
A. Steal more from Apple
B. Steal a lot more from Apple
C. Still every single element of OS 10.3
D. The current crappy, half-assed ripoff of OS X is currently sufficient for all my computing needs.
Question 3: Next year, how many Windows-specific viruses would you like to receive in e-mail:
A. The same amount as now
B. More
C. A whole lot more
D. I have a Windows box still sending out copies of SoBig at this very moment.
Question 4: How large would you like the next Windows security hole to be?
A. Large enough to accommodate a small dog.
B. Large enough to drive an SUV through.
C. Large enough to drive a Mack truck through.
D. You know that huge crawler thing NASA uses to take the space shuttle out to the pad? Yeah, that big.
Question 5: C'mon, be serious. How much for your soul?
A. Already sold mine.
B. An Xbox with the complete library of available games.
C. 10000 shares of Microsoft stock.
D. Natalie Portman
E. CowboyNeal
The vitals: Duel 1 GHz PowerMac G4, 768 MB, Radeon 9000, 10.3.2 and all the latest and greatest.
Anyone else seen this problem?
In that session, Republican did press their advantage to gerrymander Texas congressional districts, just as the Democrats had done every decade they were in charge of Texas. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, and to the victor goes the spoils. There are many things to dislike about gerrymandering, but the Supreme Court has ruled that it is prefectly legal and constitutional as long as its not done for the purpose of racial discrimination. Moreover, the new districts more accurately reflect the voting preferences of Texans as a whole.
Moreover, since when does a slanted piece by an unabashed liberal partisan complaining about the political opposition actually qualify as "stuff that matters"? Oh wait, this is Slashdot, and anything vaguely tech-related that bashes Bush or Republicans gets listed...
My prediction: The iTunes Music Store will still be going string five years from now, but all but one or two of other digital music stores will be gone.
Such a thing might work like this:
This could quickly eat up a very large amount of spammer time. And anyone who spams that address in the future alos gets feed into the bot loop!
Any here think they're capable of setting something like that up?
This is like one of those newspaper stories that procliams COMMANDER TACO A MURDERER! on the front page in 48 point type, and then three days later there's a little correction in a box at the bottom of the last column on A-42 that reads "the story about Commander Taco being a murderer on the front page of Tuesdays Daily Slasher was in error. Another man named Commander Taco was convicted of penguin murder in American Samoa in 1969. The Slasher regrets the error."
Or, to bring the point home more closely to the topic at hand, it's like when Homer got slimmed for Sexual Harassment by a TV tabloid, when all he really did was peel the gummy Venus DeMillo off his companion's ass, then when the station issued an apology, they ran it as one of hundreds flashing by on the screen at the end of the program.
I guess Slashdot just isn't willing to admit that their dislike of Fox News lead them to post a false story, and now prevents them from posting a correction anywhere "above the virtual fold" for casual viewers to see without having to click the link...
I suppose many Slashdotters are too young to remember UNESCO's scheme to "license" and "regulate" journalism in all countries. This is why Ronald Reagam quite rightly pulled all U.S. funding from UNESCO until they reformed.
The UN is an organization that does things like putting Libya in charge of its commission on human rights. Do you really want North Korea or Communist China to have a say in what YOU can or can't read online?
The UN is in no way, shape or form dedicated to the idea of democracy and individual rights. It is an organization by and for bureaucratic elites looking to expand their power and pretiege and ensure themselves easy employment. It has no moral standing, and only the power that is allowed it by the Security Council. It is not now, nor will it ever be, a "World Government," and thank God for that.
There are very few nations in the world that have a guaranteed right to free speech and a free press the way the U.S. does. (In France it's illegal to "insult the dignity" of the French President.) Putting the UN in chaarge of the Internet would be an unmittigated disaster for freedom.
Some more good names for Robot Bands:
1. Three Laws
2. Optimus Prime and the Malfunctions
3. 11 Doors Down
4. The What
5. Flee in Terror, Puny Humans!
6. Gortastic
7. IF Ready THEN Rock ELSE Next
8. Chrome Fetish
9. Kryten's Khaosium
10. Al Gore
> The critics hated "Citizen Kane", "It's a Wonderful Life" and "Star Wars" at the time.
I call BS. Star Wars had a two page review (along with a cover corner teaser) in Time magazine calling it "THE BEST FILM OF THE YEAR" when it came out. I'm sure there were some critics who hated Star Wars, but it was by no means a universal or even majority opinion.
The submitter had to mention Escape from L.A, bringing back a trauma I had successfully surpressed for many years. I saw it in a theater, for free at a preview screening, and still felt ripped off. I want those two hours of my life back! What an enormous waste of talent for everyone involved. I was hoping for the guilty, trashy fun of Escape From New York. Nope. It was just sad, limp and stupid. You've heard of straight to DVD? Escape from LA should have been straight to Mystery Science Theater 3000. A really crummy movie...
Which is more evil, hiddenagenda.com or www.hiddenagenda.org? The game designers seek to design games in which imaginary people are killed; Hidden Agenda the band write songs in which both real and imaginary people are killed. Advantage: Hidden Agenda.org.
Besides, I doubt anyone in the game design contest ever recorded songs like "Kurt Cobain is Dead and I Wish It Were You", "England's Plastic Rose", "Attack of the Giant Space Hippies", or "Proud to be The Great Satan".
I figure I can get the rate up to one frame a day of ASCII output on my line printer if I can just flip the dip switches a little faster!
People who actually know what they're talking about point out the problem is not deregulation, but botched deregulation (California is a particularly stark example of what happens when one side of the supply/demand equation is deregulated, and the other isn't) combined with short-sighted environmental laws and other legal and regulatory issues that make it difficult to build new transmission lines profitably (NIMBY lawsuits, bogus "power line cancer" junk science, etc.). What the energy market needs is better deregulation combined with tort reform and a willingness for Washington to step in and break deadlocks where new capacity is urgently needed. Vice President Dick Chaney's energy task force outlined the problem way back in 2001, but nothing has been done since. Unless something is done, expect more blacouts (at least outside of Texas).
This is just another example of the Napster zelots promoting a more expensive, propritary technology that doesn't even include a three-button mouse...
As TV continues to make the move toward pure digital information, how long will it be before we see the first TV-specific virus corrupting dowloaded shows?
"Honey, when did they add the Goatsex guy to the cast of Friends?"
So, Mr. O'Conner's claim to fame is "innovating" things that treat consumers like idiots and annoy the hell out of the rest of us. What, have the guys who invented Muzak, the CueCat and penis enlarger pills not written any books yet?
All other things being equal, I think I would prefer to read a business book by someone who invented something of lasting value rather than the creator of annoying, disposable crap.
From As The Apple Turns:
"The two devices are targeted at different markets: whereas the iPod is obviously meant to appeal to consumers with an appreciation for engineering, design, and style, the Digital Jukebox is for sewer-dwelling CHUDs with a taste for human flesh."
If both Dell and Microsoft are going to come up with their own "let's rip off Apple" music service, that means the two of them will be competing with each other. Oddly enough, Microsoft doesn't seem to like it when customers compete with them. And let's face it, a Dell/Microsoft split rift would be an annoyance for Microsoft, but a DISASTER for Dell.
If I weren't so convinced that both of them were going to release DRM-crippled, dead-on-arrival, inelegent and unwieldy abortions in trying to ripoff iTunes, I'd say this has the potential to be interesting. As it is, I suspect both services will be dead (and iTunes still doing very well indeed) by mid-2005 or so...