While I don't subscribe to the Walden Pond school of thought, I do live rather well on a modest salary. The trick is just being happy with what I currently have. My car is a way of trasporting my family when the destination is too far to walk, or the cargo too heavy to carry.
My house is not an "investment". My house is a shelter from the weather, and a depository of my worldly posessions, oh which there are fewer of every year since we deliberately bought a small place.
And since the house is small, we actually go out and interact with our fellow urban dwellers. We hang out with the family down the street. We hang out with people from church. We hang out with old friends from college. We hang out with extended family. And failing all that we just step out the door, and hang out at some random resteraunt or cafe within walking distance.
I don't change jobs often. Sure, I don't have a salary any where near competitive, but since I spend 5 years at a time at my jobs, I have a fantastic credit rating. Of course part of that is that I only owe on my house and my school loans.
Yes, my car is 4 years old. My computer is a scratchbuild that's a little out of date. My house always needs some sort of repair. My kid's toys are hand-me-downs or thrift store specials. But it really doesn't matter. "New" isn't as important as how well something does it's job.
I was always the "uncool" kid back in the 80's. For a while I was jealous of the "cool" kids. At some point I realized that trends were not worth my time of day. I don't go ot of my way to be different. I don't go out of my way to do much of anything, save defeat the forces of evil.
I'm just happy being me. And I'm doing a good job of it.
Or how about the Zero Defects, and deliberately sticking their head in the sand about known problems. Sure if you don't "know" about it, then it isn't a defect. Sure.
Portability is for Canoes. That's hilarious. If you are designing a general purpose operating system that operates:
over a family of processors for 4 different vendors (and I'm just talking x86 here)
on chipsets from a myriad vendors
operating over at least 10 different system bus architectures
communicating with peripherals across bus systems from RS/232 to Fiber Channel
utilizing storage technology from compact flash to FireWire
Interfacing hundreds of graphics processing sub-sytems from VESA to NVidia
you had better damnwell consider "portability". Especially if you are going to be heavy handed about driver support.
Or else you end up with the mess like they have now.
Customers suddenly disappearing never to return, moving onto a better existence. The ones that stay behind are doomed to seven years of trial and tribulation.
If they mean the book of Revelations type or rapture, then yeah that's about right.
Though shalt not ogle over boobies?checking... Nope, not there.
Though shalt not yank thine own crank?checking... Nope, not here.
What I do find are a whole lot of rules about murder, lying, bearing false witness, coveting what other people have, adultery, worshiping false idols, and taking the day off once a week. If you believe that Jesus guy, make sure you treat everybody like you would want to be treated yourself.
What I wouldn't give to see the christian right live by those rules. Those were the ones we KNOW the big guy gave us. All the other rules they try to cram down our throat are about them trying to control other people's lives.
They don't give a damn about children. It's just that children are the only "protected" class of people under the law.
I've always had this vision that in 20 years time I'll be sitting in a booth at a RenFair or a folk festival slaving away at C code like a guy at a glass blowing demonstration, some guy on a soap box describing what I'm doing, and a giant green screen mirroring my keystrokes to an audience:
...and now he is terminating the interrupt sequence, and returning control to the program stack. This was a very important step in ancient computer programming... Now if he is finished with the text editor, he will close the file and move on to the compiler...
A lawyer, as sailor, and a priest are trapped on a lifeboat. The sailor looks over the side, and say "These be shark infested waters." The priest look to heaven and asked "Help save us lord!"
They lawyer simple whistled. Several dorsal fins stopped circuling and headed right for the boat. They stopped in a ring as the lawyer talked to them in hushed tones. The sharks skattered underwater before the boat was suddenly lifted up, and surged forward.
The sailor gazed over the side, shocked. The sharks were carrying the boat on their backs. After a few minutes travel, they spotted land ahead. The priest said "Saint's be praised."
The boat slid onto the beach, and the three men stepped out. As they did another school of sharks appeared, and began depositing fish on the shoreline, before swimming away.
The priest said, "God has answered our prayers."
The lawyer turned and said, "Nah, this is just professional curtesy."
Well no. They couldn't have been sued and lost, because the validity of the patent would have been tested in court during their trial.
No, the people who would lose are the ones who settle. Since they didn't fight it, they basically said "here is free money, stop annoying me." Most settlements don't include agreements about if this patent should "go away." Though frankly, I would want to make sure my lawyer worked like hell to get it in.
Now I'm curious. Disney's lawyers are as infamous (or infamouse) as IBM's. What are they doing settling out of court for an iffy patent?
What I want to know is, were Disney and Virgin settling or fund raising. You have to think, if you are an old school analog signal selling corp, someone suddenly putting the Kabosh on all this cheap digital media would be something worth leasing one's soul for.
All the sudden your properties are more valuable. You can sell them without the license feels.
And don't forget about mundane things like a moron using a tape eraser nearby, or in extreme cases a wireless access point or a cordless phone putting out a dodgy signal.
You are storing information in magnetic fields. There are LOTS of things around the house that produce magnetic fields. It's doesn't take much to knock it one way or another.
Well hang on. Even during a reset the system still has power. You could devise a wrapper board to preserve the state of RAM between reboots, or more useful, detect a crash and write the state to disk, or listen for commands over the modem port. The Linux kernel has had debugging stuff like this for years.
They do it to prevent another browser from getting a toehold on the market. Their fear with Netscape was that the internet browser could become an operating platform unto itself, thus writing them out of the picture.
So they quick bought spyglass, renamed it I.E., knitted it into Windows 98. To get around "bundling" provisions in Anti-Trust law they wrote the browser into the OS as the file manager. This "functionality" is the infection vector used by most viruses. Since you use it to browse your files, as well as the Internet, the software requires far more privileged access to the OS than any Internet-Only browser would require.
Legal troubles we can laugh at. Financials we can chuckle. But invasive worms chewing through the internet are everybody's problem. It's like a housefire in a condo complex.
Here's what the Encyclopedia Galactica has to say about alchohol. It says that alcohol is a colorless volitile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars and notes it's intoxicating effect on certain carbon-based life forms.
The Hitchhiker's Guide also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.
It says that the effect of the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brain smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.
The Guide also tells you on which planets the best Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters are mixed, how much you can expect to pay for one and what voluntary organizations exist to help you rehabilitate afterwards.
The funny part is, most of the founders of binary logic were pretty loopy in their own right. If they HAD psychological pathology back in the mid 19th century the likes of Boole would be on meds.
Of course, they would also not have laid the groundwork of modern digital technology. You have to think that Liebnitz would probably be diagnosed as ADD and Newton Autism.
If forget if it was Dali or Picasso that said: "The difference between a madman and myself is that I am not mad."
Interesting. My first impression was "hey, those fancy screens are a whole lot more reflective." Then it dawned on me. That's the problem. They reflect a lot of noise from the background too.
Of course, the projectors around here are so dim that we NEED the reflective screens to see them. Older than dirt LCD's. They were so expensive in the day we built a darkened room to operate them in. (Ok, along with a video conference system, floor mounted network jacks, and a sound system.)
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While I don't subscribe to the Walden Pond school of thought, I do live rather well on a modest salary. The trick is just being happy with what I currently have. My car is a way of trasporting my family when the destination is too far to walk, or the cargo too heavy to carry.
My house is not an "investment". My house is a shelter from the weather, and a depository of my worldly posessions, oh which there are fewer of every year since we deliberately bought a small place.
And since the house is small, we actually go out and interact with our fellow urban dwellers. We hang out with the family down the street. We hang out with people from church. We hang out with old friends from college. We hang out with extended family. And failing all that we just step out the door, and hang out at some random resteraunt or cafe within walking distance.
I don't change jobs often. Sure, I don't have a salary any where near competitive, but since I spend 5 years at a time at my jobs, I have a fantastic credit rating. Of course part of that is that I only owe on my house and my school loans.
Yes, my car is 4 years old. My computer is a scratchbuild that's a little out of date. My house always needs some sort of repair. My kid's toys are hand-me-downs or thrift store specials. But it really doesn't matter. "New" isn't as important as how well something does it's job.
I was always the "uncool" kid back in the 80's. For a while I was jealous of the "cool" kids. At some point I realized that trends were not worth my time of day. I don't go ot of my way to be different. I don't go out of my way to do much of anything, save defeat the forces of evil.
I'm just happy being me. And I'm doing a good job of it.
Truth be told, they aren't going to happy until the DO have an army of one.
Portability is for Canoes. That's hilarious. If you are designing a general purpose operating system that operates:
- over a family of processors for 4 different vendors (and I'm just talking x86 here)
- on chipsets from a myriad vendors
- operating over at least 10 different system bus architectures
- communicating with peripherals across bus systems from RS/232 to Fiber Channel
- utilizing storage technology from compact flash to FireWire
- Interfacing hundreds of graphics processing sub-sytems from VESA to NVidia
you had better damnwell consider "portability". Especially if you are going to be heavy handed about driver support.Or else you end up with the mess like they have now.
Customers suddenly disappearing never to return, moving onto a better existence. The ones that stay behind are doomed to seven years of trial and tribulation.
If they mean the book of Revelations type or rapture, then yeah that's about right.
Though shalt not ogle over boobies? checking... Nope, not there.
Though shalt not yank thine own crank? checking... Nope, not here.
What I do find are a whole lot of rules about murder, lying, bearing false witness, coveting what other people have, adultery, worshiping false idols, and taking the day off once a week. If you believe that Jesus guy, make sure you treat everybody like you would want to be treated yourself.
What I wouldn't give to see the christian right live by those rules. Those were the ones we KNOW the big guy gave us. All the other rules they try to cram down our throat are about them trying to control other people's lives.
They don't give a damn about children. It's just that children are the only "protected" class of people under the law.
I think it's a TERRIBLE idea.
They lawyer simple whistled. Several dorsal fins stopped circuling and headed right for the boat. They stopped in a ring as the lawyer talked to them in hushed tones. The sharks skattered underwater before the boat was suddenly lifted up, and surged forward.
The sailor gazed over the side, shocked. The sharks were carrying the boat on their backs. After a few minutes travel, they spotted land ahead. The priest said "Saint's be praised."
The boat slid onto the beach, and the three men stepped out. As they did another school of sharks appeared, and began depositing fish on the shoreline, before swimming away.
The priest said, "God has answered our prayers."
The lawyer turned and said, "Nah, this is just professional curtesy."
No, the people who would lose are the ones who settle. Since they didn't fight it, they basically said "here is free money, stop annoying me." Most settlements don't include agreements about if this patent should "go away." Though frankly, I would want to make sure my lawyer worked like hell to get it in.
Now I'm curious. Disney's lawyers are as infamous (or infamouse) as IBM's. What are they doing settling out of court for an iffy patent?
All the sudden your properties are more valuable. You can sell them without the license feels.
Read the post. The root file system is read only, and his home directory is on a USB pen drive.
You are storing information in magnetic fields. There are LOTS of things around the house that produce magnetic fields. It's doesn't take much to knock it one way or another.
Well hang on. Even during a reset the system still has power. You could devise a wrapper board to preserve the state of RAM between reboots, or more useful, detect a crash and write the state to disk, or listen for commands over the modem port. The Linux kernel has had debugging stuff like this for years.
You root for hurricanes to come inland, don't you?
So they quick bought spyglass, renamed it I.E., knitted it into Windows 98. To get around "bundling" provisions in Anti-Trust law they wrote the browser into the OS as the file manager. This "functionality" is the infection vector used by most viruses. Since you use it to browse your files, as well as the Internet, the software requires far more privileged access to the OS than any Internet-Only browser would require.
File this under Evil and Rude.
Legal troubles we can laugh at. Financials we can chuckle. But invasive worms chewing through the internet are everybody's problem. It's like a housefire in a condo complex.
Here's what the Encyclopedia Galactica has to say about alchohol. It says that alcohol is a colorless volitile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars and notes it's intoxicating effect on certain carbon-based life forms.
The Hitchhiker's Guide also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.
It says that the effect of the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brain smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.
The Guide also tells you on which planets the best Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters are mixed, how much you can expect to pay for one and what voluntary organizations exist to help you rehabilitate afterwards.
The Guide even tells you how to mix one yourself.
Also can't enter. (Philadelphia, PA)
I'd be running over to the linen section of the department store and snapping shots of towels. Lot's of towels. On clearence!
After all, we've never shown much real initiative to get off this dustbowl. (this weeks achievement notwithstanding)
Now where did I put that electronic sub-etha signalling device?
Get my towel back to me first.
I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
An I always thought the definition of Perl was executable line noise!
"It mostly involved being on the other side of that door."
"So that's it. We are going to die..."
"Wait a minute. that button...Just kidding. Yes we are going to die."
Of course, they would also not have laid the groundwork of modern digital technology. You have to think that Liebnitz would probably be diagnosed as ADD and Newton Autism.
If forget if it was Dali or Picasso that said: "The difference between a madman and myself is that I am not mad."
Of course, the projectors around here are so dim that we NEED the reflective screens to see them. Older than dirt LCD's. They were so expensive in the day we built a darkened room to operate them in. (Ok, along with a video conference system, floor mounted network jacks, and a sound system.)