With the current administration, you can count on anything that infringes upon an individual's right to any sort of privacy to get the green light. The only group that seems to get any privacy in this country any more are those who operate behind closed doors in the Executive Branch.
Hah! I have a ton of CDs that are no longer "in print". I've made copies to protect my investment since RIAA members no longer see enough profit to continue making these older CDs available to me any more.
What genius of a CIO thought an employee taking copies of tapes home in their car constituted a good disaster recovery plan? Especially in light of the flurry of highly publicized losses of customer information in recent months. My head is spinning just thinking about all the ways that a set of tapes in someone's car could be compromised.
If this isn't a case where a C-level executive loses his/her job -- in a very public way -- for allowing such a boned-headed plan to be put in place then I don't know what sort of gaffe could ever qualify. I'll be surprised if there aren't lawsuits filed over this by Monday.
Which is a little over half the recommended amount. Personally, I wouldn't be so concerned about the vision problem you're experiencing. I'd be more concerned about the stroke that you're going to have if you don't let your body rest and heal. No monitor is going to make up for a lack of sleep. Don't think that sleeping in late on Saturday will help. It doesn't. I've tried that.
``BTW -- I used to consider myself a Republican. I don't know what to call myself now.''
Yeah, I know what you mean. I'd voted Republican in the major races since Ford. GWB managed to break that string. Such is my disgust with the man and everyone he surrounds himself with.
I gotta reason to stand outside for a day and a half in front of Fry's waiting for a wristband and the random number drawing for my chance to get the latest Microsoft product. My life will then be complete.
(Dear W3C: I really, really want a sarcasm tag.)
Just kidding, of course. This is early warning for a year's worth of swooning by Microsoft fanboys who'll be lusting over the latest bit of eye candy from their heroes. (Gawd, it's going to get unbearable.) They'll get new toys for Christmas next year since Vista will invariably obsolete any hardware that they're now using. Then companies can begin yet another terribly expensive session on the Windows upgrade treadmill.
On the plus side, maybe we'll see price slashes on today's killer hardware; it likely won't be powerful enough to run Vista. (But it'll run Linux fast enough to give you whiplash.)
And... taking a page from the SCOG playbook...
on
Ma Bell is Back
·
· Score: 1
The new AT&T declared that they own all the rights to the UNIX operating system. According to a newly discovered memo, all that USL actually received was the trademark. SBC^WAT&T said that licenses for the use of UNIX code will start at at $699.
``... are we nearing the time when we all need to worry about our genetic privacy?"''
I'm afraid we may already be there.
Just a few days ago, Eddie Curry, formerly of the Chicago Bulls, was traded to the New York Knicks because he refused to undergo a genetic test to see if he carried a gene that made him susceptible to heart problems. Curry had been benched for most of the last season after having a heart murmur (or something like that). He passed the physical with the Knicks. The Bulls made some statement about wanting him to take the test because they cared so much about his well-being. Unfortunately, if it turned out he carried the gene, he wouldn't have been allowed to play any more. At least not for the Bulls.
Now companies are just piling on. Perhaps just to see how long it'll be before Gates and Ballmer spontaneously combust in front of cameras and microphones.
I first heard of an idea similar to this on The Prairie Home Companion many years ago. It was for a ``roadkill-powered vehicle''. Perfect for trips through the northwoods. (Such a vehicle would have come in handy when I lived in S. Ohio; the dead 'possum supply was seemingly endless.) The drawback to the vehicle's power source was that you often had to take a different route home or wait for a few days for the roadkill to be replentished. I wonder if Garrison Keillor will receive any royalties from these German inventors?
So Microsoft will fire back at its critics that, even as a convicted monopolist, we should cut them some slack because, after all, they're giving the customer choices. Sure, it will be a choice of seven different ways to get screwed by Microsoft but choices nonetheless. The managers in Redmond think their doing something good here but that's because so few of them have been around long enough to remember when there was real competition and choice in the computer industry. Time will tell whether as many customers will listen the next time the MS PR siren sounds. Certainly, there are Eloi who will blindly march to Micorosft's tune but word's getting around about other real choices available to customers. I'm actually strangely optimistic about the whole thing.
So Microsoft won't support the OpenDocument format because it's inferior? Sounds like the same excuse they used for not supporting CSS, doesn't it? Seems to me that Microsoft wants to balkanize the web, heck, all of computing.
IMHO, ``inferior'' is merely a code word for ``isn't a format that we control''. Inferior my eye.
``If people *WANTED* postgres support in all their hosting accounts, ISPs would deliver it. They just might find it a bit harder to set up.
Where does this idea come from? Is issuing:
createdb username
all that difficult. Heck, it could be made part of the user account setup script.
``I tried to use postgresql years ago and it had a (ridiculous) 8k per row limit.''
I recall when that was true but it was ages ago; V6.x or, maybe, a very early V7.x release. (BTW, V8's been out since January.) You really ought to take another look at PostgreSQL.
``There were many things I couldn't do with that, mostly involving community/forum type sites.''
But there are some very nice packages out there nowadays that do support PostgreSQL. Try a search at Freshmeat.
That's the question I'm wondering about. (If there's an answer to this on the web site, I'll have to read about it laster. The site seems to have been fairly well slashdotted). I couldn't care less if the folks using IE that visit a web site have tabs available but it sure as heck would be nice to not have to arrange two different versions of the web site or include all sorts of CSS kludges to work around IE's rendering bugs. (Though I suppose it would still be necessary to have a bare-bones stylesheet for those who haven't obtained the plug-in yet.)
"... New Orleans is going through something very close to the worst case scenario right now."
Folks down in New Orleans have to sweat another month or two of hurricane season. Having even a Catagory I hit the city after the devastation that's already occured would, IMHO, be the worst case scenario.
"We (all taxpayers) WILL be paying for all this now. It is going to cost us MANY billions to fix (although still a bargain compared to Iraq.)"
And it'd at least be money spent on a mess of our own making instead of Iraq's. Oh wait! That's really our mess, isn't it?
Seriously (not that the current MFU in Iraq isn't serious, it's just seriously off-topic), I wonder if there won't be some Federal limitations on how any loans can be used for reconstruction. As I recall, after the nasty flooding that occurred along the Mississippi some years ago, there were prohibitions on rebuilding in the flood plains. I believe that some small towns no longer exist -- at least not where they used to exist -- because they couldn't rebuild. Not with Federal loans, anyway.
I saw Santorum get interviewed on one of the Sunday morning news/talk shows not too long ago. The interviewer turned him into a blithering idiot, stammering, and barely able to finish a sentence whenever his stance on whatever topic being discussed was challenged. It was rather breathtaking how he was totally unable to defend his positions. If I'd seen his performance before an election I know I would have been casting a vote for one of his opponents. Luckily, I live in Illinois where our politicians have exchanged competence and ethics for eloquence and charm. They may be crooks but they're often pleasant to listen to.
Oh, those'll be so much better. Conservatives can have their library, liberals theirs. It'll be just like the old classical music ad on TV: remember ``No unwanted passages!''? The private libraries won't have any books containing of those annoying ideas that aren't the same as yours. They'll be great. And so much smaller than today's libraries -- since none of those materials you don't agree with will be cluttering up the stacks -- that it'll be easier to find the books you like.
... Earth-to-Mars calculation packages and, more importantly, who's buying them? I mean, that got to be a niche market if there ever was one.
In a former life, I worked for a group that did some work for the Naval Research Laboratories. Some of the work involved LEO satellites. When asked what software package they were using (knowing that there were several available through COSMIC) to do the calculations, I still recall the answer: ``Oh, we just write our own.'' (As though they do it whenever they need such a program, probably while eating their corn flakes in the morning. Heck, they probably did just that.:-) Being mere mortals, we bought the sources for one of the nicer COSMIC packages. Name of it escapes me.)
So is there really a market for doing interplanetary orbital calculations that someone's actually able to sell a package for $150 a pop?
The folks that are actually able to send something from Earth to Mars I suspect are already able to whip out this code in short order. (Dang, I wish I'd watched `The Day the Earth Stood Still' over the weekend like I wanted to. Then I'd be able to include that nifty quote that Klaatu uttered about ``being good enough to get me from planet to planet''.)
Lemme guess, there's a long description of a general purpose computer in the application? Sorry, I haven't plowed through the entire application. Yet. Oh, wait! There it is. It's Figure 1 in the application. Dang! Now, I'll bet, we're all infringing. How many of us aren't using this apparatus?
Actually, I was hoping this was merely some BS about putting ``numbers in a box'' to which I could respond: What! You mean "\framebox{3.14...}" isn't good enough! Unfortunately, I can't read this application without my mind, let alone my eyes, glazing over so who knows whether there's an OSS application that could be infringing on this patent. It does appear to be something more than just that, though. The bad thing is, from what I've read so far, it appears that I could be found to be stealing Microsft's valuable IP if I were to get clever some evening and code up some Emacs macro to perform a find and replace operation on numeric strings/phrases wrapping the located text in one of those \framebox directives. Something tells me that LyX already does this.
Just another example of how the US patent process is totally screwed up.
There's times when I think a company like Microsoft is applying for all these patents just to make a point of how messed up the USPTO is. But then I think I wonder who'd be whining the loudest if software patents were to be found invalid?
At least when Y2K came along, not everything needed to be fixed or replaced.
This will affect nearly all computer systems in some way -- either a BIOS change, OS patch, or the like -- and many consumer electronics devices will be essentially broken. (I've been putting off replacing some of the stuff but now may have to in order to get the clock to work correctly.)
And we're doing this to ourselves for some dubious energy savings that would be dwarfed by any serious effort to save energy (like tightening the CAFE standards, promoting hybrid vehicles, etc.) Just another half-baked idea born of, perhaps, five minutes of debate in the Congressional halls^Wmen's room.
Slashdot Mirror
With the current administration, you can count on anything that infringes upon an individual's right to any sort of privacy to get the green light. The only group that seems to get any privacy in this country any more are those who operate behind closed doors in the Executive Branch.
Hah! I have a ton of CDs that are no longer "in print". I've made copies to protect my investment since RIAA members no longer see enough profit to continue making these older CDs available to me any more.
What genius of a CIO thought an employee taking copies of tapes home in their car constituted a good disaster recovery plan? Especially in light of the flurry of highly publicized losses of customer information in recent months. My head is spinning just thinking about all the ways that a set of tapes in someone's car could be compromised.
If this isn't a case where a C-level executive loses his/her job -- in a very public way -- for allowing such a boned-headed plan to be put in place then I don't know what sort of gaffe could ever qualify. I'll be surprised if there aren't lawsuits filed over this by Monday.
... as long as Sparkle is destroyed as well. You know, sort of like a matter/antimatter reaction.
Oh wait, that be the end of Weebl and Bob [1]. Damn! OK, OK. I guess web animation actually has a purpose after all.
[1] - Try these: "pie", "riot", "art", and "Magical Trevor"
Which is a little over half the recommended amount. Personally, I wouldn't be so concerned about the vision problem you're experiencing. I'd be more concerned about the stroke that you're going to have if you don't let your body rest and heal. No monitor is going to make up for a lack of sleep. Don't think that sleeping in late on Saturday will help. It doesn't. I've tried that.
Dang! Something's got to be done about the length of the submission queue at Slashdot!
A fighting robot, eh? This reminds me of the old Twilight Zone episode "Steel" (with Lee Marvin).
Yeah, I know what you mean. I'd voted Republican in the major races since Ford. GWB managed to break that string. Such is my disgust with the man and everyone he surrounds himself with.
I gotta reason to stand outside for a day and a half in front of Fry's waiting for a wristband and the random number drawing for my chance to get the latest Microsoft product. My life will then be complete.
(Dear W3C: I really, really want a sarcasm tag.)
Just kidding, of course. This is early warning for a year's worth of swooning by Microsoft fanboys who'll be lusting over the latest bit of eye candy from their heroes. (Gawd, it's going to get unbearable.) They'll get new toys for Christmas next year since Vista will invariably obsolete any hardware that they're now using. Then companies can begin yet another terribly expensive session on the Windows upgrade treadmill.
On the plus side, maybe we'll see price slashes on today's killer hardware; it likely won't be powerful enough to run Vista. (But it'll run Linux fast enough to give you whiplash.)
The new AT&T declared that they own all the rights to the UNIX operating system. According to a newly discovered memo, all that USL actually received was the trademark. SBC^WAT&T said that licenses for the use of UNIX code will start at at $699.
I'm afraid we may already be there.
Just a few days ago, Eddie Curry, formerly of the Chicago Bulls, was traded to the New York Knicks because he refused to undergo a genetic test to see if he carried a gene that made him susceptible to heart problems. Curry had been benched for most of the last season after having a heart murmur (or something like that). He passed the physical with the Knicks. The Bulls made some statement about wanting him to take the test because they cared so much about his well-being. Unfortunately, if it turned out he carried the gene, he wouldn't have been allowed to play any more. At least not for the Bulls.
Now companies are just piling on. Perhaps just to see how long it'll be before Gates and Ballmer spontaneously combust in front of cameras and microphones.
I first heard of an idea similar to this on The Prairie Home Companion many years ago. It was for a ``roadkill-powered vehicle''. Perfect for trips through the northwoods. (Such a vehicle would have come in handy when I lived in S. Ohio; the dead 'possum supply was seemingly endless.) The drawback to the vehicle's power source was that you often had to take a different route home or wait for a few days for the roadkill to be replentished. I wonder if Garrison Keillor will receive any royalties from these German inventors?
So Microsoft will fire back at its critics that, even as a convicted monopolist, we should cut them some slack because, after all, they're giving the customer choices. Sure, it will be a choice of seven different ways to get screwed by Microsoft but choices nonetheless. The managers in Redmond think their doing something good here but that's because so few of them have been around long enough to remember when there was real competition and choice in the computer industry. Time will tell whether as many customers will listen the next time the MS PR siren sounds. Certainly, there are Eloi who will blindly march to Micorosft's tune but word's getting around about other real choices available to customers. I'm actually strangely optimistic about the whole thing.
So Microsoft won't support the OpenDocument format because it's inferior? Sounds like the same excuse they used for not supporting CSS, doesn't it? Seems to me that Microsoft wants to balkanize the web, heck, all of computing.
IMHO, ``inferior'' is merely a code word for ``isn't a format that we control''. Inferior my eye.
all that difficult. Heck, it could be made part of the user account setup script.
I recall when that was true but it was ages ago; V6.x or, maybe, a very early V7.x release. (BTW, V8's been out since January.) You really ought to take another look at PostgreSQL.
But there are some very nice packages out there nowadays that do support PostgreSQL. Try a search at Freshmeat.
I'll shed no tears over the apparent superhuman effort that the FBI and company feels is needed to find out where a browser keeps its files.
I believe it was our Beloved Leader (TM) who said something to the effect of "Fighting evil-doers is hard work!"
That's the question I'm wondering about. (If there's an answer to this on the web site, I'll have to read about it laster. The site seems to have been fairly well slashdotted). I couldn't care less if the folks using IE that visit a web site have tabs available but it sure as heck would be nice to not have to arrange two different versions of the web site or include all sorts of CSS kludges to work around IE's rendering bugs. (Though I suppose it would still be necessary to have a bare-bones stylesheet for those who haven't obtained the plug-in yet.)
Folks down in New Orleans have to sweat another month or two of hurricane season. Having even a Catagory I hit the city after the devastation that's already occured would, IMHO, be the worst case scenario.
And it'd at least be money spent on a mess of our own making instead of Iraq's. Oh wait! That's really our mess, isn't it?
Seriously (not that the current MFU in Iraq isn't serious, it's just seriously off-topic), I wonder if there won't be some Federal limitations on how any loans can be used for reconstruction. As I recall, after the nasty flooding that occurred along the Mississippi some years ago, there were prohibitions on rebuilding in the flood plains. I believe that some small towns no longer exist -- at least not where they used to exist -- because they couldn't rebuild. Not with Federal loans, anyway.
... that it holds more than 40 rounds (bolts?).
I saw Santorum get interviewed on one of the Sunday morning news/talk shows not too long ago. The interviewer turned him into a blithering idiot, stammering, and barely able to finish a sentence whenever his stance on whatever topic being discussed was challenged. It was rather breathtaking how he was totally unable to defend his positions. If I'd seen his performance before an election I know I would have been casting a vote for one of his opponents. Luckily, I live in Illinois where our politicians have exchanged competence and ethics for eloquence and charm. They may be crooks but they're often pleasant to listen to.
``I'm also waiting private libraries ...''
Oh, those'll be so much better. Conservatives can have their library, liberals theirs. It'll be just like the old classical music ad on TV: remember ``No unwanted passages!''? The private libraries won't have any books containing of those annoying ideas that aren't the same as yours. They'll be great. And so much smaller than today's libraries -- since none of those materials you don't agree with will be cluttering up the stacks -- that it'll be easier to find the books you like.
... Earth-to-Mars calculation packages and, more importantly, who's buying them? I mean, that got to be a niche market if there ever was one.
In a former life, I worked for a group that did some work for the Naval Research Laboratories. Some of the work involved LEO satellites. When asked what software package they were using (knowing that there were several available through COSMIC) to do the calculations, I still recall the answer: ``Oh, we just write our own.'' (As though they do it whenever they need such a program, probably while eating their corn flakes in the morning. Heck, they probably did just that. :-) Being mere mortals, we bought the sources for one of the nicer COSMIC packages. Name of it escapes me.)
So is there really a market for doing interplanetary orbital calculations that someone's actually able to sell a package for $150 a pop? The folks that are actually able to send something from Earth to Mars I suspect are already able to whip out this code in short order. (Dang, I wish I'd watched `The Day the Earth Stood Still' over the weekend like I wanted to. Then I'd be able to include that nifty quote that Klaatu uttered about ``being good enough to get me from planet to planet''.)
Lemme guess, there's a long description of a general purpose computer in the application? Sorry, I haven't plowed through the entire application. Yet. Oh, wait! There it is. It's Figure 1 in the application. Dang! Now, I'll bet, we're all infringing. How many of us aren't using this apparatus?
Actually, I was hoping this was merely some BS about putting ``numbers in a box'' to which I could respond: What! You mean "\framebox{3.14...}" isn't good enough! Unfortunately, I can't read this application without my mind, let alone my eyes, glazing over so who knows whether there's an OSS application that could be infringing on this patent. It does appear to be something more than just that, though. The bad thing is, from what I've read so far, it appears that I could be found to be stealing Microsft's valuable IP if I were to get clever some evening and code up some Emacs macro to perform a find and replace operation on numeric strings/phrases wrapping the located text in one of those \framebox directives. Something tells me that LyX already does this.
Just another example of how the US patent process is totally screwed up. There's times when I think a company like Microsoft is applying for all these patents just to make a point of how messed up the USPTO is. But then I think I wonder who'd be whining the loudest if software patents were to be found invalid?
At least when Y2K came along, not everything needed to be fixed or replaced.
This will affect nearly all computer systems in some way -- either a BIOS change, OS patch, or the like -- and many consumer electronics devices will be essentially broken. (I've been putting off replacing some of the stuff but now may have to in order to get the clock to work correctly.)
And we're doing this to ourselves for some dubious energy savings that would be dwarfed by any serious effort to save energy (like tightening the CAFE standards, promoting hybrid vehicles, etc.) Just another half-baked idea born of, perhaps, five minutes of debate in the Congressional halls^Wmen's room.