Among many other things, the PC was taken. It had two partitions, Windows and Linux. It was never recovered.
The good thing is that I had a fairly recent backup using cpio on a tape drive. I was able to restore it just fine once I went on eBay and bought another tape drive. Newer module, with more capacity (10GB vs. 2.5GB) but read only backwards compatible.
Nowadays, I use an external disk in a USB 2.0 enclosure. No affordable tape drives can keep up with the fast pace of disk capacity and techies obsession with hoarding digital junk.
The other thing I did is have a monitored alarm system installed. The cost is some $27 a month, taxes included.
None of the above is laptop specific, but it does the job pretty well.
Arabic and Islamic themes in Frank Herbert's Dune
on
New Dune Movie Confirmed
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· Score: 2, Insightful
There is a lot more Islamic and Arabic stuff in Dune that one thinks.
I had the pleasure of meeting Dmitri Gaskin recently.
Dmitri is from the Bay Area who has been contributing to the Drupal project and maintaining some modules.
The funny and amazing part is that he is 12 years old, and was 10 years old when he started with the community. The co-maintainers of the modules did not know he was that young when he started contributing patches and gave him CVS access to their modules, based on what patches he contributed already.
When Google started the Google Highly Open Participation (GHOP) for high school students, he was too young to qualify, so instead he was mentoring the 15 year old high school kids!
That is not unique to Vista. I have seen this on Windows XP on a Dell. The Dell had USB ports in the keyboard and front and back USB once. The front ones are under a cover and very hard to reach when the PC is on the floor. When the USB stick was plugged into the keyboard, it said this is USB 1.1 blah blah. But it was far more convenient to not lean down and fiddle with the cover and have the USB ports facing down.
So, is Vista SP1 superior because it is doing something that XP did all along? I don't see that as an advantage.
10 centuries ago, an Arab ambassador from Baghdad to the Volga by the name of Ibn Fadlan was kidnapped by Vikings and taken to Scandinavia.
He lived there for a few years and later wrote a book about what he saw there.
One of the things he describes in detail is the battles between the Vikings and monstrous people with a foul smell (he mentions a name for them which does not sound Arabic, but I forgot what it was). From his description, I thought "Neanderthals" too.
Michael Crichton made a novel out of it was made into a movie, starring Antonio Banderas. The movie changed those monster to humans wearing animal skins.
I have the printed Arabic original, which is missing its ending, but it is fascinating to read. He even mentions the aurora borealis, and it making sounds.
Grendel the monster in Beowulf could be interpreted as a Neanderthal too.
How likely? Not very, but interesting nonetheless.
Part of the takeover bid is to address this to some extent.
Microsoft says that it will "offer significant retention packages to Yahoo engineers, key leaders and employees".
This will work for some (most?).
Others will quit, but those may be the minority. Many have families and mortgages to worry about and stock options or retirement plans that they will abandon.
But it will affect the projects: the sponsorship in the form of conferences, patches, salary for full time developers, and direct money from that big company will dry up. The PR of "large company using FOSS" will not be there to the same magnitude.
Moreover, Microsoft will be able to increase its footprint of technology used in LARGE web sites, and brag about that, just like they did with GoDaddy domain parking.
It would not be converted in a single day. Hotmail took a long time, and was plagued with problems. Yahoo is 50 times bigger, and will take a lot of effort and time.
This is why it may be like the python swallowing the alligator and exploding. This kill Microsoft or severely damage it.
I agree it will give people options.
Side point: Google has no interest in PHP. They are largely a Python shop, and hence picking up Rasmus may not be feasible.
Google buying Yahoo is another matter. It is better than MSFT doing so, but still there will be one less player in the market and hence less competition.
Open source will not die because of this. It could be anywhere between "merely inconvenienced" to "taking a big hit".
Microsoft will not continue to run on an open source platform, like they did with Hotmail.
- PHP: heavily used in Yahoo. Yahoo employs PHP founder and project lead Rasmus Lerdorf. - Apache: Yahoo uses Apache heavily, and has many patches and modules for it. IIS will replace it. - MySQL: likewise, they use it heavily. Expect MS-SQL in there. - FreeBSD and Linux: they use them a lot. Expect those to be turfed for Windows. - Yahoo YUI javascript library.
Yahoo also hosts open source events (e.g. OSCMS: Open Source Content Management Systems back in March 2007).
All the sponsorship money, paying salaries for open source leads,...etc. will end.
Yahoo is the provisioner of email to Rogers, a very large ISP (and cell phone provider, among other things) here in Canada. Rogers' competitor, Sympatico is allied with MSN. So, there will be some impact here if this goes through.
Google acquiring Yahoo is a lesser evil, but still one less competitor to keep the others honest.
But with an offer on the table, and a possible counter offer/alliance from Google, something is going to happen, and it will have profound implications on many people.
It is not micker, but rather MICR (Magnetic Ink Character Recognition).
I worked with MICR equipment for several years, and it is a surprise that the ink is not magnetized. Several years ago, we found that laser ink will not be magnetized, and we did flagging of the cheque as a fraud suspect based on that fact (OCR will read a line, but MICR will not). Then recently we started seeing that laser ink is now magnetized and that method for fraud detection is no longer valid. I think inkjet was also magnetized.
According to the CIA, the US imports 2/3 of its consumed oil.
Your statement that oil:
gives far too much power to current and potential enemies.
Did you know that the US imports more oil from Canada than from Saudi Arabia? As per the DOE (in thousands of barrels).
Canada: Oct 2007 exports to the USA: 74,727 Venezuela: Oct 2007 exports to the USA: 43,015 Saudi Arabia: Oct 2007 exports to the USA: 43,394
I hope you do not count Canada as a "current or potential enemy".
And come to think of it: yes, Venezuela's president is not friendly to the USA, but in reality, how can he hurt the USA? Stop exports and hurt his own economy? Jack up the price of oil? He can't do it alone, and OPEC is not to blame, rather the US foreign policy is to blame there, with the invasion of Iraq hiking up oil prices rather than the promised lowering of it.
As for Saudi Arabia, they have been a US ally all along, despite the general feeling in the media. The rulers there are not popular because of that stance. Bin Laden himself opposed them, and that is why his citizenship was revoked, and then exiled first to Sudan and then to Afghanistan. The rest is history. So how are they a current or potential enemy?
That is totally possible, but it misses the point.
Both MySQL and InnoDB were dual licensed. They have a GPL version, and a proprietary version. The non-GPL version can be licensed to customers who want to redistribute their application/solution without all of it being GPL.
Their agreement with InnoBase allowed them to do that.
Now that Oracle owns InnoBase, the licensing of the non-GPL version is in question. Will Oracle pull the plug at some point? Will they kill MySQL's revenue stream by doing that? Who knows.
So, while the GPL version is out there, the revenue from relicensing InnoDB is not, and hence the dilemma.
MySQL AB started writing a new engine called Falcon...
Depends on whether you want systems type job, or application type jobs. Datawarehousing falls in the business application domain. Java is mostly for business applications too. If that is what you want, then as others said, get a coop job to get a feel for what work is like. If you want to do device drivers or systems level things, then you'd better do something about it.
In all cases, having a tech job means that you continue to learn as long as you work in the field. What you know now will be obsolete and that will later be obsolete.
After a while, you may get bored from coding after doing it year in and year out, and want to do other things. The desirable skills are people skills, team building, supervisory skills, organizing, written and verbal communications, presentation, interaction with customers,...etc.
Although I am in Canada, I bought an unlocked HTC Hermes/TyTN (AT&T/Cingular 8525) from eBay. Being a GSM phone, my SIM card from Rogers worked instantly.
Here is to hoping that Google or HTC will provide that, although that would anger HTC's clients (the carriers).
About 10 years or so ago, there was a customer of ours who used UNIX systems.
According to an email exchange with a friend, here is what happened.
A few people there shared administrative access. One of them created a cron entry that started a series of file removals. The backup operator did not validate the backups well too.
When this was discovered, the cron job was killed, and a fairly recent backup was restored. The missing transactions were reposted.
The case was closed and tighter security measures were implemented.
In this case, there was no real damage done, except for the wasted time and effort. No one was punished.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it works both ways.
One can ask whether J.K. Rowling has borrowed from J.R.R. Tolkien too.
I had a break in several years ago too.
Among many other things, the PC was taken. It had two partitions, Windows and Linux. It was never recovered.
The good thing is that I had a fairly recent backup using cpio on a tape drive. I was able to restore it just fine once I went on eBay and bought another tape drive. Newer module, with more capacity (10GB vs. 2.5GB) but read only backwards compatible.
Nowadays, I use an external disk in a USB 2.0 enclosure. No affordable tape drives can keep up with the fast pace of disk capacity and techies obsession with hoarding digital junk.
The other thing I did is have a monitored alarm system installed. The cost is some $27 a month, taxes included.
None of the above is laptop specific, but it does the job pretty well.
There is a lot more Islamic and Arabic stuff in Dune that one thinks.
See Arabic and Islamic themes in Frank Herbert's Dune.
Dmitri is from the Bay Area who has been contributing to the Drupal project and maintaining some modules.
The funny and amazing part is that he is 12 years old, and was 10 years old when he started with the community. The co-maintainers of the modules did not know he was that young when he started contributing patches and gave him CVS access to their modules, based on what patches he contributed already.
When Google started the Google Highly Open Participation (GHOP) for high school students, he was too young to qualify, so instead he was mentoring the 15 year old high school kids!
He even presented a session at DrupalCon Boston.
When I saw Dmitri, I felt happy and humbled. I just did not think he is so short!
See also:
Desire2Learn is local here in the Kitchener-Waterloo area.
They were devastated by the earlier court ruling, and now this?
Here is an article from the local newspaper on the topic.
Note: RIM is also local here, and NTP's affair with them was closely followed.
Time to revamp how patents are issued, or have the USPTO pay the court damages due to wrongly issued patents.
That is not unique to Vista. I have seen this on Windows XP on a Dell. The Dell had USB ports in the keyboard and front and back USB once. The front ones are under a cover and very hard to reach when the PC is on the floor. When the USB stick was plugged into the keyboard, it said this is USB 1.1 blah blah. But it was far more convenient to not lean down and fiddle with the cover and have the USB ports facing down.
So, is Vista SP1 superior because it is doing something that XP did all along? I don't see that as an advantage.
10 centuries ago, an Arab ambassador from Baghdad to the Volga by the name of Ibn Fadlan was kidnapped by Vikings and taken to Scandinavia.
He lived there for a few years and later wrote a book about what he saw there.
One of the things he describes in detail is the battles between the Vikings and monstrous people with a foul smell (he mentions a name for them which does not sound Arabic, but I forgot what it was). From his description, I thought "Neanderthals" too.
Michael Crichton made a novel out of it was made into a movie, starring Antonio Banderas. The movie changed those monster to humans wearing animal skins.
I have the printed Arabic original, which is missing its ending, but it is fascinating to read. He even mentions the aurora borealis, and it making sounds.
Grendel the monster in Beowulf could be interpreted as a Neanderthal too.
How likely? Not very, but interesting nonetheless.
The older iPods worked fine with anything.
...
All bets are off when you have the latest generation iPods.
My daughter won an iPod Nano in a contest around October last year. Nifty little thing. Really nice and all.
All attempts to make it work with Amarok failed. We had to resort to installing Windows XP on a partition so that she can use iTunes on it.
I know a friend who bought his wife and iPod, then returned it for a Sandisk Sansa in disgust.
This really left a very bad taste about Apple and their tactics. If they were the size of Microsoft, they would be just as bad
This seems to overlap/compete with Parrot. Of course Sun are expected to promote their own JVM. I don't see Perl going JVM though.
Part of the takeover bid is to address this to some extent.
Microsoft says that it will "offer significant retention packages to Yahoo engineers, key leaders and employees".
This will work for some (most?).
Others will quit, but those may be the minority. Many have families and mortgages to worry about and stock options or retirement plans that they will abandon.
No, it won't go away. That was not my point.
But it will affect the projects: the sponsorship in the form of conferences, patches, salary for full time developers, and direct money from that big company will dry up. The PR of "large company using FOSS" will not be there to the same magnitude.
Moreover, Microsoft will be able to increase its footprint of technology used in LARGE web sites, and brag about that, just like they did with GoDaddy domain parking.
It would not be converted in a single day. Hotmail took a long time, and was plagued with problems. Yahoo is 50 times bigger, and will take a lot of effort and time.
This is why it may be like the python swallowing the alligator and exploding. This kill Microsoft or severely damage it.
I agree it will give people options.
Side point: Google has no interest in PHP. They are largely a Python shop, and hence picking up Rasmus may not be feasible.
Google buying Yahoo is another matter. It is better than MSFT doing so, but still there will be one less player in the market and hence less competition.
Open source will not die because of this. It could be anywhere between "merely inconvenienced" to "taking a big hit".
There are many implications for the proposed Microsoft/Yahoo merger for open source.
...etc. will end.
Microsoft will not continue to run on an open source platform, like they did with Hotmail.
- PHP: heavily used in Yahoo. Yahoo employs PHP founder and project lead Rasmus Lerdorf.
- Apache: Yahoo uses Apache heavily, and has many patches and modules for it. IIS will replace it.
- MySQL: likewise, they use it heavily. Expect MS-SQL in there.
- FreeBSD and Linux: they use them a lot. Expect those to be turfed for Windows.
- Yahoo YUI javascript library.
Yahoo also hosts open source events (e.g. OSCMS: Open Source Content Management Systems back in March 2007).
All the sponsorship money, paying salaries for open source leads,
This is not good news at all.
Yahoo is the provisioner of email to Rogers, a very large ISP (and cell phone provider, among other things) here in Canada. Rogers' competitor, Sympatico is allied with MSN. So, there will be some impact here if this goes through.
The implications of Microsoft bidding $44.6 B for Yahoo are many, and they are all bad news. Bad for customers, bad for the internet at large, bad for employees, and bad for open source.
Google acquiring Yahoo is a lesser evil, but still one less competitor to keep the others honest.
But with an offer on the table, and a possible counter offer/alliance from Google, something is going to happen, and it will have profound implications on many people.
I wrote an article on this here: Education, social status and terror leadership.
It is not micker, but rather MICR (Magnetic Ink Character Recognition).
I worked with MICR equipment for several years, and it is a surprise that the ink is not magnetized. Several years ago, we found that laser ink will not be magnetized, and we did flagging of the cheque as a fraud suspect based on that fact (OCR will read a line, but MICR will not). Then recently we started seeing that laser ink is now magnetized and that method for fraud detection is no longer valid. I think inkjet was also magnetized.
According to the CBC they are mainly targeting so called domain kiting (repeated tasting), which will impact tasting too.
Your statement that oil:
How did this get a +5?
You can do:
$ find ${SOMEPATH} -type f -exec grep -i "${PATTERN}" {} \;
Or:
$ grep -r -i "${PATTERN}"
That is totally possible, but it misses the point.
...
Both MySQL and InnoDB were dual licensed. They have a GPL version, and a proprietary version. The non-GPL version can be licensed to customers who want to redistribute their application/solution without all of it being GPL.
Their agreement with InnoBase allowed them to do that.
Now that Oracle owns InnoBase, the licensing of the non-GPL version is in question. Will Oracle pull the plug at some point? Will they kill MySQL's revenue stream by doing that? Who knows.
So, while the GPL version is out there, the revenue from relicensing InnoDB is not, and hence the dilemma.
MySQL AB started writing a new engine called Falcon
Very true.
This is why MySQL AB turned around and bought solidDB, and started writing Falcon in-house, a new transactional engine.
Why steal when you can just share?
There are initiatives to "wire" entire blocks/cities via wireless.
For example, check FreeTheNet.
Depends on whether you want systems type job, or application type jobs. Datawarehousing falls in the business application domain. Java is mostly for business applications too. If that is what you want, then as others said, get a coop job to get a feel for what work is like. If you want to do device drivers or systems level things, then you'd better do something about it.
...etc.
In all cases, having a tech job means that you continue to learn as long as you work in the field. What you know now will be obsolete and that will later be obsolete.
After a while, you may get bored from coding after doing it year in and year out, and want to do other things. The desirable skills are people skills, team building, supervisory skills, organizing, written and verbal communications, presentation, interaction with customers,
I am looking forward to that too.
Although I am in Canada, I bought an unlocked HTC Hermes/TyTN (AT&T/Cingular 8525) from eBay. Being a GSM phone, my SIM card from Rogers worked instantly.
Here is to hoping that Google or HTC will provide that, although that would anger HTC's clients (the carriers).
According to an email exchange with a friend, here is what happened.
In this case, there was no real damage done, except for the wasted time and effort. No one was punished.