before you reply, know that I am not ignorant of these topics.
Please elaborate.
Neither your content-free original trolling post nor your numerous content-free irate responses to the critics of said trolling post contain any suggestion of your being other than ignorant on the topic of nanotechnology.
I think that bombing people is horrible. But the public needs to become aware of the very real danger that nanotechnology, biotechnology, and AI pose. It is indeed very, very likely that humanity will not survive this century.
Your statement is both pathetic and sad. It's pathetic in that such profound ignorance actually exists and promotes itself. It's sad in that there are probably many ignorant victims who will actually swallow its fearful and intrinsically defeatist message.
Some NAS devices support a complete email server, even if it's not always installed or active by default (usually it's not). We have a Synology NAS, and use its email server to combine local email (for our dyndns "domain") and accounts on a number of external hosts. Since it's on the NAS, useful features such as automated backup to external disk include the email with little extra configuration.
...a Christian prayer event that was his brainchild.
Perry frequently invoked God. ...prayed for challenges facing the nation...
The last thing the USA needs is another president who views the world through the filter of some religion or other. Paying lip-service to one is tolerable (Clinton, Bush sr, etc.), and may even be a political requirement with such an unsophisticated and poorly educated electorate, but actually being a fervent "believer" is probably a recipe for disaster or at least alienation (Bush jr, Carter).
Sony apologized publicly. For a Japanese company, that's pretty serious. I know we here take an apology to mean crap, but that wasn't some PR spin. That was legit guilt.
So how many fingers did they cut off as yubitsume?
Not even one? Well, that's not much of an apology, then. Executives, even a gaijin like Stringer, should behave in a more culturally appropriate fashion.
If you'd ever had to deal with someone stalking you, you'd understand why having pseudonyms can be so important.
Yup,one ex-GF (from more than 20 years ago!) is known to be still fixated on me, and has an actual license-to-kill (i.e. certified insane, legally). This is one of the reasons I don't use my real name online very much, and don't publicize names for my wife and teenage kids. Thankfully, I have a very famous "predecessor" who copiously pollutes all but the most skillful Google searches. So, apart from defensively making and abandoning a slew of diversionary FB accounts with my real name, I prefer to use a few pseudonyms.
If you want to communicate a message far and wide, you do what you can to get it out.
Hell, my real name (it's rather unusual and immediately recognizable, worldwide) has been rejected or tagged as fake a few times by operators of sites where I registered with it. A few times, I got a free mug or T-shirt out of the error, and probably caused an amazed or embarrassed site operator. If I want to blend in, it's easier to use a less remarkable fake name, such as Mohammad Fong O'Reilly or Krishna Obama-Stalin.
The problem comes from the fact that a lot of products and media companies have started having their own Facebook or Twitter page and give links to that instead of their own website.
What do I see when I try to view a Facebook page? A login page.
Way to BLOCK YOURSELVES FROM YOUR OWN VIEWERS, idiots.
Alas, there appears to be more than enough morons who make FB accounts simply to access pages for Radio Rot or Dampers Diapers or Scandal TV. Those of us who refuse to access FB-based pages simply don't count. Firstly, we're invisible to these idiot companies. Secondly, they may be on FB specifically to catch the moron demographic, so we're irrelevant or would be unwelcome.
We dealt with multitasking here before, and how badly people do it. Empirically, those who rate themselves good at multitasking are usually worse at it than those who rate themselves poorly.
It's not clear what proportion of Ubuntu users actually use Ubuntu One. We have three PCs at home running Ubuntu (four users), and have never registered with Ubuntu One, and are unlikely to do so.
The spam I get uses forged headers anyway, and was sent from botnets.
So even if abuse@(yahoo|gmail|hotmail|whatever) would cooperate, there is nothing they can do about a bot sending directly to the recipient's server with a fake From: header.
Almost all the spam I receive (but there's damn little of it) also has forged headers, usually including the From:, Return-path: and Received: fields, and often an X-Originating-IP: field also. However, a perusal of the headers usually reveals the true origin of the spam, usually an IP address in China or the US, or some compromised mail server. If you learn to parse the headers, you can usually spot where the spam really originated, even if the header contains a number of forged fields...
I have a 3G dongle with 15GB data for £15 a month and 2GB of data on my phone for £15 a month.
Why would I need a cabled internet???
The other few hundred GiB you might use? We have an unlimited (as in actually unlimited) connection, and have never reached 1TiB in a month. However, we are normally above 100GiB and have passed 500GiB a few times. No dodgy torrents or other stuff, just parents and kids and regular stuff. The higher usage months occur after a release of Ubuntu or PCLinuxOS, as we participate in their torrent swarms.
I'm old enough to be the dad of many here (and my older daughter counts herself a geek). My audio setup is a mix of gear, the newest being almost 25 years old, if PCs and suchlike are not counted. I replaced the amplifier 33 years ago, and the speakers are of similar vintage and slightly on the large side.
Not all that is old is good: there is a definite mix of old and new which outperforms the all-old and all-new options. For example, we never use the B&O turntable any more - all of my LPs have too many clicks or hisses from overuse. Many of the LPs have been replaced by CDs over the years, and between my wife and me, we have around 600 of them. Similarly, the cassette deck is not used much; we digitized all of the good tapes quite a while ago. However, the CD player is used heavily, as is the aux input from our media server, even if the MP3s are only at 160-192kbps.
There is a notable difference between playing the media server's MP3s over the tiny speakers in a PC (grotty), over the PS3+TV speakers (passable), over large Sennheiser headphones attached to a PC (good), and through the B&O amp + Audiosphere speakers (very good).
But somehow I have trouble believing that the customer would get nothing out of this. Even if it's only faster delivery to an end user , that is a very real and very tangible thing.
I just ran their test on a page from my web site. The page contains a flash photo presentation with accompanying music (still waiting for a non-Flash-based tool of comparable features and ease of use; nothing even remotely close exists). According to webpagetest.org the original page loaded in 2.4 seconds, while Google's "optimized" version took 21.3 seconds. Neither of them actually loaded the Flash presentation properly. Is this because Google dislikes Flash or is it a problem with webpagetest.org?
Have you tried with 1x512MB and 1x1GB? That might just work.
Alas, it was the first one I tried - 1GB in the easily accessible slot, and 512MB in the other slot. Of course it gave a boot error, and I went through the rigmarole of accessing the other slot (under keyboard which must be completely removed and then under two other daughterboards which must also be removed???), and discovering that 2 identical 1GB modules (which each work fine alone) also results in a boot error. My suspicion is that Sony did not build the extra address line into some connector or perhaps the firmware deliberately baulks at more than 1GB.
It's not a big issue, but every year or so I scan the available laptops. It seems there are a few with 1920x1200 screens, but they're double the price of comparable models with 1920x1080 screens.
Actually, my laptop at work is a Dell M4400 with the 1920x1200 screen (slightly smaller in inches than the Sony), but I would not regard it as an adequate replacement for the Sony. It has a much faster dual core CPU, more RAM, better GPU, and so forth, but accompanied by an appalling hardware failure rate. Out of six laptops in our group for a bit more than a year, there have been 2 motherboard failures, 1 hard disk failure, and mine had a display failure. They are mainly desktop substitutes and have been pampered rather than suffering the usual laptop abuses, so there is no excuse for such shoddy hardware. There's no way that shit would become my personal laptop...
1.6GHz Celeron, maxed out with 1GB RAM, ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 graphics.
This is DDR-1 SO-DIMM right? Many of the laptops of this generation state in their specs that their maximum amount of RAM is 1GB (being 2x512MB) As a matter of fact, it seems that these usually do support two modules of 1GB. I have tested this personally in two cases: a Compaq N800c and a Packard Bell E1 245. Both specced max 1GB, both work perfectly fine with 2GB.
Just saying, in case it would be useful.
Thanks for the suggestion, but I have tried, and it seems that Sony only provided enough address lines for 1GB in this model. It has two RAM slots (one is a real bugger to access, 40+ screws and some delicate manipulation of clips and suchlike), and works fine with 2x512MB or 1x1024MB RAM module, but with 2x1024MB modules it gives a RAM error on boot. I went back to the original 2x512 RAM modules, and returned the 1024MB modules to the shop.
Interestingly, the laptop's standard RAM was 512MB (2x256MB), and I purchased it with the upgrade to 1GB (2x512MB). As delivered, it had 2x512MB installed, and the unused 2x256MB modules were in a nice box. Why? Beats me. No sane person would want to down-grade, so I assume it was a packaging issue.
The 1GB RAM is not a real inconvenience, as it's plenty for running any programs. The laptop is used for document processing, email, browsing, graphics (Gimp+Inkscape+BibblePro), and is quick enough. When it had Ubuntu with Gnome, it was more of a slug even without Compiz than it is today with LXDE+Compiz. RAM usage is also much less with LXDE+Compiz than with Gnome without Compiz. Of course, for any video processing or handling large batches or raw photos, we use one of our quad-core desktops (where the overhead of Gnome+Compiz is nonintrusive).
$500 sounds like a low end laptop. I bought myself Clevo laptop last year that cost $3000 because I was traveling a lot. But it's freaking awesome and is still working great. However, it was 17.1" and obviously a bit too large to use comfortably on flights. I could easily think about getting ThinkPad Tablet for those flights and also to use comfortably from bed and sofa. I was already thinking about getting iPad, but this really looks better and more business oriented too.
So, you bought an expensive $3000 laptop just last year and are glad it is "still working great"?! Talk about lowered expectations.
I bought a relatively expensive laptop almost 8 years ago, and it's still working great, too! I regard this as good value...
It has a gorgeous 17" 1920x1200 screen (not that shortscreen 1920x1080 that infests the market nowadays) with every pixel still working. Running Lubuntu with compiz goodness and adequate performance/speed, despite its lowly specs: 1.6GHz Celeron, maxed out with 1GB RAM, ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 graphics. Still using its original battery which gives about 2 hours with fairly bright screen and network in use. This laptop is unlikely to be replaced until the shortscreen nonsense leaves us - those extra 120 vertical pixels are actually quite valuable.
FWIW, it's an early Sony VAIO VGN-A117S. From the days when Sony hardware meant something (in a positive sense).
if you're referring to my posts (and even if you're not), i intentionally adopted a mostly-uncapitalized style to reflect my perception that online discussion is a (novel) compromise between formal writing and spoken language. i still usually capitalize proper names only out of respect for others.
I PREFER TO CAPITALIZE EVERYTHING, JUST TO BE SURE...
In the case of the telephone - of course one gets the patent. The one filing the earliest, in a sane system that doesn't open the can of worms of "first to invent".
Alas, this may not have happened in the case of the telephone. There is evidence that Elisha Gray both invented first and filed first. However, the examiner for Gray's application was an alcoholic who owed money to Bell's lawyer. Misery and controversy ensued, and Bell got the patent (not necessarily without skulduggery). Read this for a discussion of the evidence both ways.
Slashdot Mirror
before you reply, know that I am not ignorant of these topics.
Please elaborate.
Neither your content-free original trolling post nor your numerous content-free irate responses to the critics of said trolling post contain any suggestion of your being other than ignorant on the topic of nanotechnology.
I think that bombing people is horrible. But the public needs to become aware of the very real danger that nanotechnology, biotechnology, and AI pose. It is indeed very, very likely that humanity will not survive this century.
Your statement is both pathetic and sad. It's pathetic in that such profound ignorance actually exists and promotes itself. It's sad in that there are probably many ignorant victims who will actually swallow its fearful and intrinsically defeatist message.
Not learning PHP will likely save you from hanging yourself with an Ethernet cable in shame once you discover how thoroughly PHP mutilates you mind.
Curse these flimsy UTP ethernet cables! They keep breaking when I put my full weight on them. Where is thickwire when you really need it?
Some NAS devices support a complete email server, even if it's not always installed or active by default (usually it's not). We have a Synology NAS, and use its email server to combine local email (for our dyndns "domain") and accounts on a number of external hosts. Since it's on the NAS, useful features such as automated backup to external disk include the email with little extra configuration.
...a Christian prayer event that was his brainchild.
...prayed for challenges facing the nation...
Perry frequently invoked God.
The last thing the USA needs is another president who views the world through the filter of some religion or other. Paying lip-service to one is tolerable (Clinton, Bush sr, etc.), and may even be a political requirement with such an unsophisticated and poorly educated electorate, but actually being a fervent "believer" is probably a recipe for disaster or at least alienation (Bush jr, Carter).
The alcoholics should be allowed to drink themselves to death. Evolution in action.
If they manage to die before reproducing...
They used to fall on their swords, so I'm going to have to disagree with you...
Falling on one's sword was an ancient Roman tradition. In recent centuries, the Japanese expected rather more of a failed leader.
Sony apologized publicly. For a Japanese company, that's pretty serious. I know we here take an apology to mean crap, but that wasn't some PR spin. That was legit guilt.
So how many fingers did they cut off as yubitsume?
Not even one? Well, that's not much of an apology, then. Executives, even a gaijin like Stringer, should behave in a more culturally appropriate fashion.
If you'd ever had to deal with someone stalking you, you'd understand why having pseudonyms can be so important.
Yup,one ex-GF (from more than 20 years ago!) is known to be still fixated on me, and has an actual license-to-kill (i.e. certified insane, legally). This is one of the reasons I don't use my real name online very much, and don't publicize names for my wife and teenage kids. Thankfully, I have a very famous "predecessor" who copiously pollutes all but the most skillful Google searches. So, apart from defensively making and abandoning a slew of diversionary FB accounts with my real name, I prefer to use a few pseudonyms.
Even easier solution
Use a real sounding fake name..
If you want to communicate a message far and wide, you do what you can to get it out.
Hell, my real name (it's rather unusual and immediately recognizable, worldwide) has been rejected or tagged as fake a few times by operators of sites where I registered with it. A few times, I got a free mug or T-shirt out of the error, and probably caused an amazed or embarrassed site operator. If I want to blend in, it's easier to use a less remarkable fake name, such as Mohammad Fong O'Reilly or Krishna Obama-Stalin.
The problem comes from the fact that a lot of products and media companies have started having their own Facebook or Twitter page and give links to that instead of their own website.
What do I see when I try to view a Facebook page? A login page.
Way to BLOCK YOURSELVES FROM YOUR OWN VIEWERS, idiots.
Alas, there appears to be more than enough morons who make FB accounts simply to access pages for Radio Rot or Dampers Diapers or Scandal TV. Those of us who refuse to access FB-based pages simply don't count. Firstly, we're invisible to these idiot companies. Secondly, they may be on FB specifically to catch the moron demographic, so we're irrelevant or would be unwelcome.
We dealt with multitasking here before, and how badly people do it. Empirically, those who rate themselves good at multitasking are usually worse at it than those who rate themselves poorly.
It's not called "distracting" without reason.
It's not clear what proportion of Ubuntu users actually use Ubuntu One. We have three PCs at home running Ubuntu (four users), and have never registered with Ubuntu One, and are unlikely to do so.
The spam I get uses forged headers anyway, and was sent from botnets.
So even if abuse@(yahoo|gmail|hotmail|whatever) would cooperate, there is nothing they can do about a bot sending directly to the recipient's server with a fake From: header.
Almost all the spam I receive (but there's damn little of it) also has forged headers, usually including the From:, Return-path: and Received: fields, and often an X-Originating-IP: field also. However, a perusal of the headers usually reveals the true origin of the spam, usually an IP address in China or the US, or some compromised mail server. If you learn to parse the headers, you can usually spot where the spam really originated, even if the header contains a number of forged fields...
I have a 3G dongle with 15GB data for £15 a month and 2GB of data on my phone for £15 a month. Why would I need a cabled internet???
The other few hundred GiB you might use? We have an unlimited (as in actually unlimited) connection, and have never reached 1TiB in a month. However, we are normally above 100GiB and have passed 500GiB a few times. No dodgy torrents or other stuff, just parents and kids and regular stuff. The higher usage months occur after a release of Ubuntu or PCLinuxOS, as we participate in their torrent swarms.
I'm old enough to be the dad of many here (and my older daughter counts herself a geek). My audio setup is a mix of gear, the newest being almost 25 years old, if PCs and suchlike are not counted. I replaced the amplifier 33 years ago, and the speakers are of similar vintage and slightly on the large side.
Not all that is old is good: there is a definite mix of old and new which outperforms the all-old and all-new options. For example, we never use the B&O turntable any more - all of my LPs have too many clicks or hisses from overuse. Many of the LPs have been replaced by CDs over the years, and between my wife and me, we have around 600 of them. Similarly, the cassette deck is not used much; we digitized all of the good tapes quite a while ago. However, the CD player is used heavily, as is the aux input from our media server, even if the MP3s are only at 160-192kbps.
There is a notable difference between playing the media server's MP3s over the tiny speakers in a PC (grotty), over the PS3+TV speakers (passable), over large Sennheiser headphones attached to a PC (good), and through the B&O amp + Audiosphere speakers (very good).
But what about the analogy of "child sexual abuse" and "a small, rural road in Scotland?"
Sheep have children?
But somehow I have trouble believing that the customer would get nothing out of this. Even if it's only faster delivery to an end user , that is a very real and very tangible thing.
I just ran their test on a page from my web site. The page contains a flash photo presentation with accompanying music (still waiting for a non-Flash-based tool of comparable features and ease of use; nothing even remotely close exists). According to webpagetest.org the original page loaded in 2.4 seconds, while Google's "optimized" version took 21.3 seconds. Neither of them actually loaded the Flash presentation properly. Is this because Google dislikes Flash or is it a problem with webpagetest.org?
Have you tried with 1x512MB and 1x1GB? That might just work.
Alas, it was the first one I tried - 1GB in the easily accessible slot, and 512MB in the other slot. Of course it gave a boot error, and I went through the rigmarole of accessing the other slot (under keyboard which must be completely removed and then under two other daughterboards which must also be removed???), and discovering that 2 identical 1GB modules (which each work fine alone) also results in a boot error. My suspicion is that Sony did not build the extra address line into some connector or perhaps the firmware deliberately baulks at more than 1GB.
It's not a big issue, but every year or so I scan the available laptops. It seems there are a few with 1920x1200 screens, but they're double the price of comparable models with 1920x1080 screens.
Actually, my laptop at work is a Dell M4400 with the 1920x1200 screen (slightly smaller in inches than the Sony), but I would not regard it as an adequate replacement for the Sony. It has a much faster dual core CPU, more RAM, better GPU, and so forth, but accompanied by an appalling hardware failure rate. Out of six laptops in our group for a bit more than a year, there have been 2 motherboard failures, 1 hard disk failure, and mine had a display failure. They are mainly desktop substitutes and have been pampered rather than suffering the usual laptop abuses, so there is no excuse for such shoddy hardware. There's no way that shit would become my personal laptop...
This is DDR-1 SO-DIMM right? Many of the laptops of this generation state in their specs that their maximum amount of RAM is 1GB (being 2x512MB) As a matter of fact, it seems that these usually do support two modules of 1GB. I have tested this personally in two cases: a Compaq N800c and a Packard Bell E1 245. Both specced max 1GB, both work perfectly fine with 2GB.
Just saying, in case it would be useful.
Thanks for the suggestion, but I have tried, and it seems that Sony only provided enough address lines for 1GB in this model. It has two RAM slots (one is a real bugger to access, 40+ screws and some delicate manipulation of clips and suchlike), and works fine with 2x512MB or 1x1024MB RAM module, but with 2x1024MB modules it gives a RAM error on boot. I went back to the original 2x512 RAM modules, and returned the 1024MB modules to the shop.
Interestingly, the laptop's standard RAM was 512MB (2x256MB), and I purchased it with the upgrade to 1GB (2x512MB). As delivered, it had 2x512MB installed, and the unused 2x256MB modules were in a nice box. Why? Beats me. No sane person would want to down-grade, so I assume it was a packaging issue.
The 1GB RAM is not a real inconvenience, as it's plenty for running any programs. The laptop is used for document processing, email, browsing, graphics (Gimp+Inkscape+BibblePro), and is quick enough. When it had Ubuntu with Gnome, it was more of a slug even without Compiz than it is today with LXDE+Compiz. RAM usage is also much less with LXDE+Compiz than with Gnome without Compiz. Of course, for any video processing or handling large batches or raw photos, we use one of our quad-core desktops (where the overhead of Gnome+Compiz is nonintrusive).
Google Beta!
or will it be Google Alpha?
$500 sounds like a low end laptop. I bought myself Clevo laptop last year that cost $3000 because I was traveling a lot. But it's freaking awesome and is still working great. However, it was 17.1" and obviously a bit too large to use comfortably on flights. I could easily think about getting ThinkPad Tablet for those flights and also to use comfortably from bed and sofa. I was already thinking about getting iPad, but this really looks better and more business oriented too.
So, you bought an expensive $3000 laptop just last year and are glad it is "still working great"?! Talk about lowered expectations.
I bought a relatively expensive laptop almost 8 years ago, and it's still working great, too! I regard this as good value...
It has a gorgeous 17" 1920x1200 screen (not that shortscreen 1920x1080 that infests the market nowadays) with every pixel still working. Running Lubuntu with compiz goodness and adequate performance/speed, despite its lowly specs: 1.6GHz Celeron, maxed out with 1GB RAM, ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 graphics. Still using its original battery which gives about 2 hours with fairly bright screen and network in use. This laptop is unlikely to be replaced until the shortscreen nonsense leaves us - those extra 120 vertical pixels are actually quite valuable.
FWIW, it's an early Sony VAIO VGN-A117S. From the days when Sony hardware meant something (in a positive sense).
Typical misunderstanding with Japanese pronunciation:
Q: "When do you have elections in Japan?"
A: "Ah yes, have one plactically evely molning!"
if you're referring to my posts (and even if you're not), i intentionally adopted a mostly-uncapitalized style to reflect my perception that online discussion is a (novel) compromise between formal writing and spoken language. i still usually capitalize proper names only out of respect for others.
I PREFER TO CAPITALIZE EVERYTHING, JUST TO BE SURE...
In the case of the telephone - of course one gets the patent. The one filing the earliest, in a sane system that doesn't open the can of worms of "first to invent".
Alas, this may not have happened in the case of the telephone. There is evidence that Elisha Gray both invented first and filed first. However, the examiner for Gray's application was an alcoholic who owed money to Bell's lawyer. Misery and controversy ensued, and Bell got the patent (not necessarily without skulduggery). Read this for a discussion of the evidence both ways.