You're laughing, but someone at Slate is going to lose their job over this article. It's reminiscent of nothing in my short term memory, related to Microsoft.
I dunno, the first thing that I thought when I saw that an arm of microsoft was willing to reccomend a non-Microsoft product was "What do they get out of the deal?". If they admit (passively) that IE is insecure, or not very good, then when they release XP-SP2, they can make a big deal out of going back to reccomending IE, thus tempting people to try it out.
Christ, as a degree holding classicist, I can't let you get away with two sentences with that many errors in them.
XP is a long used symbol for Christ, dating back to some of the earliest christian artwork, with the symbols pronounced Chi-Rho in Roman. We could say the year of XP is 1.
Let's take it one at a time:
XP is a long used symbol for Christ
XP is not a symbol for Christ. It is the first two letters of the word "Christ" in Greek.
dating back to some of the earliest christian artwork
Dating back actually to the battle of the Milvian bridge, where the would-be Roman emperor Constantine fought the would-be Roman emperor Maxentius. The actual story of why they were both fighting goes back to Diocletian's division of the empire to a system of 2 senior and 2 junor rulers (2 Augusti and 2 caesars). Constantine saw the sign "XP" in the sky on his way to the bridge with his army (accounts vary), and he interpreted it to mean that if he had his soldiers paint XP on their shields, christ would help him win. Some accounts include that he heard the words "In hoc signo vinces", or "In this sign, conquer".
with the symbols pronounced Chi-Rho in Roman
No, no, no, no! Chi and Rho are GREEK letters. Not to mention ROMAN is not a language. Latin is the language spoken by the Roman people. X and P (Chi and Rho) are the first two letters of XPISTOS, chi-rho-iota-sigma-tau-omicron-sigma, or the Greek translation of the hebrew word for messiah, "one annointed by god".
We could say the year of XP is 1
Or, we could say that the year of XP (i.e. the year that it became significantly important) is 312 A.D., the year of the battle at the milvian bridge.
how long till the "discs that cannot be hacked themselves" will be hacked?
two hours, or two weeks? (remember de-CSS code printed on t-shirts?)
I have one of those shirts (it's getting a little old, I got it in 99 or 2000, and it has a hole or two and some bleach spots). But, I was paying close attention during that whole fiasco. The deal with "cracking" the CSS encryption wasn't that some kid figured it out comparing encrypted to non-encrypted information. IIRC, the Xing DVD player left the key in their software almost in plain text (as in, a literal global string constant) which was easy to reverse engineer by decompiling the code or using softice to trace the calls and stuff.
Which brings us back to the point here - It's not the disks you have to watch out for, it's the players.
The last dell computers we bought when I worked at Netmar that were desktops - they had a thing in the freaking BIOS that asked you to agree to the EULA. You could NOT boot the computer past the bios without agreeing to the windows EULA. Seriously. Not even to the point where you could boot off a CD and install linux.
Wasn't aware of that. However, if I was to guess, I would say that dell probably wouldn't do it without spinning off a division for it. I dunno. It didn't used to be like that, so that's interesting.
The thing you're missing here is that ALL of "Dell Desktops" ship with windows, without exception. Period. You cannot buy a "Desktop" computer from dell w/out windows on it. This is because of the licence agreement with microsoft - Put windows on EVERYTHING you sell, and you can get a discount (say, like, $30/copy rather than $99). But, if you offer any other OS, or no OS, you won't get the discount. So, yeah, it's Dell's choice to spend $70 additional in a market where $30 profit per unit is considered "good"
What dell has done has drawn a VERY distinct line between their servers and their desktops - to the extent that their cases for each look different. If you configure a desktop, it will have Windows on it. If you configure a server, it will have the option for windows, but, notice, it's full price. It also has the option for linux, or no OS.
So, Dell is screwing microsoft's agreement over by splitting their company into two halves (sort of), one making desktops and one servers. Kinda the same way Microsoft screws the DOJ by making two divisions, one for Windows and office, and one for everything else.
It's not the fuel its self, it's the engine. A gasoline engine uses a spark plug to ignite the fuel; a diesel engine uses compression (as a gas is compressed more, it increases in temperature - the idea being that eventually, it gets to the flash point of the fuel). if your temperature is low to begin with (0F), then it takes more pressure to get it up to the flash point.
You may call me a troll for saying so, but if you (the universal you, not the specific you) buy a big truck/suv and get a gas motor, you're a total idiot.
Disclaimer: I drive a Honda Accord.
There are reasons for not buying diesel vehicles not outlined in your post. Sure, the gas right now is cheaper. The fuel economy is better, in theory.
But, what about this: I live where it drops below 25 in about October and comes back above in about March, with several two-day long dips below -10. If I had a diesel, I might need a block heater (and certainly would if I lived much farther north), which would need an extention cable snaking out of my apartment, and I assure you that would only last one saturday night before some drunk kid cuts it in half and kills himself, or trips on it, or whatever. And where do I plug in when I go to work? Public electricity outlets don't exactly abound.
Not to mention, we think of diesel fuel as cheap now, because when we go to the gas station, we see regular gas at $1.84/gallon, and the diesel is $1.53/gallon. However, diesel is much less affected by changes in market conditions, and as a result, fluctuates less. I remember 2 years ago seeing regular gas for $1.29/gallon and diesel for $1.40. Hell, in fact, I remember back in 1999 seeing gas for $0.83/gallon and diesel for $1.20/gallon.
Not to mention, if I were to estimate, if you take out gas stations which only exist because of off ramps on interstates, I would say not more than 1 in 10 sells diesel fuel. So, you may have to drive out of your way to get gas. Which isn't a tragedy, but it is annoying and time consuming.
So, you have to take these into account when you consider diesel or gas.
Yeah, back in 1999 when I signed up for my slashdot account, I thought it would be funny to take the same name as the guy in the movie hackers. Which, to me, is still funny. And, screw everyone else, I like that movie, even for all its faults.
Unfortunately, I've kind of locked myself into a corner here - people see zerocool and don't take me seriously, however, the UID is so low, i'm not willing to give it up.
Opera is closed source. For all you know it could be infested with just as many nasties as IE. I mean, it probably isn't; but you just don't know, do you?
That's strike one against opera. Strike two is that it's not freaking free. I'm sorry, but the days of paying for a web browser were... oh wait, web browsers have always been free.
I'd actually be much more worried about UNIX time overflowing the 32 bit integer. In 2038, the number of seconds since Jan 1, 1970 will roll over the limit for an unsigned 32 bit integer.
It's time to upgrade to 64 bit unix time, so that you don't have to worry about the roll-over until A.D. 292,278,994.
My thought on this is that major news outlets do writeups of popular figures before they die so that they can be out first with a touching biography. So, someone forgot to change the year when they dug out the bio they wrote 6 years ago on this guy.
Yeah, but I assume the fuel cell is a closed system - If the plane suddenly went from 1 Atmosphere of pressure to 0.2 atmospheres of pressure, and the methanol was presumably still at 1 atm., it might burst. As far as lighting on fire... not too sure about that one. But your lap might get wet.
Of course, the lack of oxygen should be a bigger problem at this point. Not to mention, if you're in a de-pressurized airplane, you should probably turn off electrical devices to be safe anyway.
I've recorded a bunch of stuff, and it sounds pretty good (as a quality comparason, I was on a few of the songs at www.atomicraygunattack.com). But, you put it on a CD next to a modern band, and it's just not loud enough. Even though it's already clipping.
God, that sucks. But, when you're trying to make it big, you don't want to be the band that the label exec has to turn up the volume to hear.
And if you're running sendmail, any mail sent to an email address that does not exist on the system will fall through a series of checks, eventually landing at local delivery, in which case, bob@mail.webhostingcompany.com will get a crap load of spam (i.e. everything sent to bob@anydomain that doesn't exist).
This was annoying as piss. Our customers had, oh, i dunno, roughly 600 domains between them all, and every domain was configured on the mail server. So, I'd get spam destined for will@any_domain_on_the_system for which there wasn't actually an alias for will. God.
Heh, they're still around. They have released a couple of albums: Rancid 2000 and Indestructable, which are both good. I had serious doubts about rancid making it into the new decade and still being good, but they surpassed my expectations. If you like rancid, you would like the last two albums. They're the same rancid, evolving as they see fit, not to fit the times.
I know that sounds like a record review, but 2000 and Indestructible are both albums I've listened to at least 30 times each, and I really feel that way about them.
Incidentally, I have never heard of a single artist who turned down a contract merely because it was with an RIAA label.
Ever heard of Rancid?
After the "Ruby Soho" craze, they had people beating down their door, throwing money at them. But, they were unwilling to give up the freedom that being on a small label gave them - they weren't willing to sign their lives away for the money, when what they wanted was to not get screwed.
Different is an adjective. Differently is an adverb. Think Differently, Apple. Unless you actually want people to think of the word different, in which case you're still casting an adjective as a noun.
Slashdot Mirror
I bow to you. Greek is my language, not latin.
You're laughing, but someone at Slate is going to lose their job over this article. It's reminiscent of nothing in my short term memory, related to Microsoft.
I dunno, the first thing that I thought when I saw that an arm of microsoft was willing to reccomend a non-Microsoft product was "What do they get out of the deal?". If they admit (passively) that IE is insecure, or not very good, then when they release XP-SP2, they can make a big deal out of going back to reccomending IE, thus tempting people to try it out.
Or, something.
~Wx
Christ, as a degree holding classicist, I can't let you get away with two sentences with that many errors in them.
XP is a long used symbol for Christ, dating back to some of the earliest christian artwork, with the symbols pronounced Chi-Rho in Roman. We could say the year of XP is 1.
Let's take it one at a time:
XP is a long used symbol for Christ
XP is not a symbol for Christ. It is the first two letters of the word "Christ" in Greek.
dating back to some of the earliest christian artwork
Dating back actually to the battle of the Milvian bridge, where the would-be Roman emperor Constantine fought the would-be Roman emperor Maxentius. The actual story of why they were both fighting goes back to Diocletian's division of the empire to a system of 2 senior and 2 junor rulers (2 Augusti and 2 caesars). Constantine saw the sign "XP" in the sky on his way to the bridge with his army (accounts vary), and he interpreted it to mean that if he had his soldiers paint XP on their shields, christ would help him win. Some accounts include that he heard the words "In hoc signo vinces", or "In this sign, conquer".
with the symbols pronounced Chi-Rho in Roman
No, no, no, no! Chi and Rho are GREEK letters. Not to mention ROMAN is not a language. Latin is the language spoken by the Roman people. X and P (Chi and Rho) are the first two letters of XPISTOS, chi-rho-iota-sigma-tau-omicron-sigma, or the Greek translation of the hebrew word for messiah, "one annointed by god".
We could say the year of XP is 1
Or, we could say that the year of XP (i.e. the year that it became significantly important) is 312 A.D., the year of the battle at the milvian bridge.
~Will
how long till the "discs that cannot be hacked themselves" will be hacked?
two hours, or two weeks? (remember de-CSS code printed on t-shirts?)
I have one of those shirts (it's getting a little old, I got it in 99 or 2000, and it has a hole or two and some bleach spots). But, I was paying close attention during that whole fiasco. The deal with "cracking" the CSS encryption wasn't that some kid figured it out comparing encrypted to non-encrypted information. IIRC, the Xing DVD player left the key in their software almost in plain text (as in, a literal global string constant) which was easy to reverse engineer by decompiling the code or using softice to trace the calls and stuff.
Which brings us back to the point here - It's not the disks you have to watch out for, it's the players.
HAHA, you know what's fucked up?
The last dell computers we bought when I worked at Netmar that were desktops - they had a thing in the freaking BIOS that asked you to agree to the EULA. You could NOT boot the computer past the bios without agreeing to the windows EULA. Seriously. Not even to the point where you could boot off a CD and install linux.
How bad is that?!?
~Wx
Wasn't aware of that. However, if I was to guess, I would say that dell probably wouldn't do it without spinning off a division for it. I dunno. It didn't used to be like that, so that's interesting.
~Wx
But even dell is starting to ship linux system
The thing you're missing here is that ALL of "Dell Desktops" ship with windows, without exception. Period. You cannot buy a "Desktop" computer from dell w/out windows on it. This is because of the licence agreement with microsoft - Put windows on EVERYTHING you sell, and you can get a discount (say, like, $30/copy rather than $99). But, if you offer any other OS, or no OS, you won't get the discount. So, yeah, it's Dell's choice to spend $70 additional in a market where $30 profit per unit is considered "good"
What dell has done has drawn a VERY distinct line between their servers and their desktops - to the extent that their cases for each look different. If you configure a desktop, it will have Windows on it. If you configure a server, it will have the option for windows, but, notice, it's full price. It also has the option for linux, or no OS.
So, Dell is screwing microsoft's agreement over by splitting their company into two halves (sort of), one making desktops and one servers. Kinda the same way Microsoft screws the DOJ by making two divisions, one for Windows and office, and one for everything else.
~Will
It's not the fuel its self, it's the engine. A gasoline engine uses a spark plug to ignite the fuel; a diesel engine uses compression (as a gas is compressed more, it increases in temperature - the idea being that eventually, it gets to the flash point of the fuel). if your temperature is low to begin with (0F), then it takes more pressure to get it up to the flash point.
You may call me a troll for saying so, but if you (the universal you, not the specific you) buy a big truck/suv and get a gas motor, you're a total idiot.
Disclaimer: I drive a Honda Accord.
There are reasons for not buying diesel vehicles not outlined in your post. Sure, the gas right now is cheaper. The fuel economy is better, in theory.
But, what about this: I live where it drops below 25 in about October and comes back above in about March, with several two-day long dips below -10. If I had a diesel, I might need a block heater (and certainly would if I lived much farther north), which would need an extention cable snaking out of my apartment, and I assure you that would only last one saturday night before some drunk kid cuts it in half and kills himself, or trips on it, or whatever. And where do I plug in when I go to work? Public electricity outlets don't exactly abound.
Not to mention, we think of diesel fuel as cheap now, because when we go to the gas station, we see regular gas at $1.84/gallon, and the diesel is $1.53/gallon. However, diesel is much less affected by changes in market conditions, and as a result, fluctuates less. I remember 2 years ago seeing regular gas for $1.29/gallon and diesel for $1.40. Hell, in fact, I remember back in 1999 seeing gas for $0.83/gallon and diesel for $1.20/gallon.
Not to mention, if I were to estimate, if you take out gas stations which only exist because of off ramps on interstates, I would say not more than 1 in 10 sells diesel fuel. So, you may have to drive out of your way to get gas. Which isn't a tragedy, but it is annoying and time consuming.
So, you have to take these into account when you consider diesel or gas.
~Will
Just to let you know... I got your joke. It didn't go un-noticed.
And if you didn't mean it as a joke, yeah, um, I hate to be the one to tell you, but there's no S. Morgenstern.
~Wx
Yeah, back in 1999 when I signed up for my slashdot account, I thought it would be funny to take the same name as the guy in the movie hackers. Which, to me, is still funny. And, screw everyone else, I like that movie, even for all its faults.
Unfortunately, I've kind of locked myself into a corner here - people see zerocool and don't take me seriously, however, the UID is so low, i'm not willing to give it up.
Whatever, people are people.
~Will
Your name isn't... Inigo Montoya... is it..??
Opera is closed source. For all you know it could be infested with just as many nasties as IE. I mean, it probably isn't; but you just don't know, do you?
That's strike one against opera. Strike two is that it's not freaking free. I'm sorry, but the days of paying for a web browser were... oh wait, web browsers have always been free.
~Will
stability has not improved.
Windows 95 was obviously more stable than Windows XP.
Troll.
~Wx
I'd actually be much more worried about UNIX time overflowing the 32 bit integer. In 2038, the number of seconds since Jan 1, 1970 will roll over the limit for an unsigned 32 bit integer.
It's time to upgrade to 64 bit unix time, so that you don't have to worry about the roll-over until A.D. 292,278,994.
~W
My thought on this is that major news outlets do writeups of popular figures before they die so that they can be out first with a touching biography. So, someone forgot to change the year when they dug out the bio they wrote 6 years ago on this guy.
Just a theory.
~Will
Why would depressurization blow a fuel cell?
methanol does not require pressurization.
Yeah, but I assume the fuel cell is a closed system - If the plane suddenly went from 1 Atmosphere of pressure to 0.2 atmospheres of pressure, and the methanol was presumably still at 1 atm., it might burst. As far as lighting on fire... not too sure about that one. But your lap might get wet.
Of course, the lack of oxygen should be a bigger problem at this point. Not to mention, if you're in a de-pressurized airplane, you should probably turn off electrical devices to be safe anyway.
~Will
Oh, oh, ok - in your *laptop*. I thought for a second this post was still attached to the "Fuel Cell Vibrator" post above.
Whew.
~Will
Well, at least they made the webpage before the movie came out...
I mean, firefly has had problems with stuff being done out of order, right?
~Wx
For double irony points, guess the race of the CEOs of the entertainment conglomerates that make the most money out of selling this memeset to blacks.
I'm going to go ahead with "Jewish".
God damn, agreed.
I've recorded a bunch of stuff, and it sounds pretty good (as a quality comparason, I was on a few of the songs at www.atomicraygunattack.com). But, you put it on a CD next to a modern band, and it's just not loud enough. Even though it's already clipping.
God, that sucks. But, when you're trying to make it big, you don't want to be the band that the label exec has to turn up the volume to hear.
Sigh.
And if you're running sendmail, any mail sent to an email address that does not exist on the system will fall through a series of checks, eventually landing at local delivery, in which case, bob@mail.webhostingcompany.com will get a crap load of spam (i.e. everything sent to bob@anydomain that doesn't exist).
This was annoying as piss. Our customers had, oh, i dunno, roughly 600 domains between them all, and every domain was configured on the mail server. So, I'd get spam destined for will@any_domain_on_the_system for which there wasn't actually an alias for will. God.
Fuck sendmail.
~Will
Heh, they're still around. They have released a couple of albums: Rancid 2000 and Indestructable, which are both good. I had serious doubts about rancid making it into the new decade and still being good, but they surpassed my expectations. If you like rancid, you would like the last two albums. They're the same rancid, evolving as they see fit, not to fit the times.
I know that sounds like a record review, but 2000 and Indestructible are both albums I've listened to at least 30 times each, and I really feel that way about them.
~Wx
Incidentally, I have never heard of a single artist who turned down a contract merely because it was with an RIAA label.
Ever heard of Rancid?
After the "Ruby Soho" craze, they had people beating down their door, throwing money at them. But, they were unwilling to give up the freedom that being on a small label gave them - they weren't willing to sign their lives away for the money, when what they wanted was to not get screwed.
~Will
Not to mention:
Different is an adjective. Differently is an adverb. Think Differently, Apple. Unless you actually want people to think of the word different, in which case you're still casting an adjective as a noun.
~Will