Your anecdote had some value and added to the discussion. You described an abuse by one priest at one church. Your message was going somewhere. But you blew it in your fourth paragraph:
All churches are fucking crazy --
That doesn't follow smoothly from the previous three paragraphs. You'll need to provide more supporting evidence.
Don't be an idiot. There are many uses for an older laptop, often running DOS.
I have one on a test bench at work right now. It logs the data coming out of the serial port of a PIC controller that I've set up to measure on/off cycles on appliance timers. All that was needed was the 'lowest end' laptop I could get IT to allocate out of their junkpile.
I also recently deployed two Dell Optiplexes as DOS machines for similar logging functions. It was faster just to partition 200 MB of the 8GB hard drives when running FDISK as that's more than will ever be needed for the DOS 5.0 install, and it's faster to only format a 200MB partition.
And for embedded system development, you just need a assembler and the tool to download code to program the target. Often there is a DOS version available. If you want to be able to task-switch between rom-burn/coding screens, throw Windows 3.1 on the machine to use as a task switcher.
You'd think from the attitude cast on this site sometimes that there were non-nerds present in the discussions.
Touch screens are also considerably less expensive to implement than well designed and durable physical switches. Physical switches on something that's gonna withstand an environment for extended periods require actual engineering (not just 'oh so fash' designers to make something that looks flashy.) It's a cheep thing, ya know. Look for more and more touch screens as companies compete to make cheaper and cheaper consumer-grade devices.
Be careful. Some 'nerds' have outbuildings to keep their collections of cool stuff in. We live out in the country 'cuz the land and space is cheaper. We don't just collect classic Sun hardware, we also traffic in cool old kickstart (Maytag) gas engines, machine tools, large lab equipment, etc.
We're not particularly afraid of crime. We acknowledge that there are particular forms of dress than thugs tend to favor over 'normal' clothes almost to distinguish themselves. Regular 'black' and 'white' people don't need to wear costumes to look 'cool' or whatever it is. It's not a matter of race. It's a matter of not finding it interesting any longer to hang around people who are either thugs, or poseurs who dress like thugs to be 'cool.'
Nerds dress like nerds, ya know. Fuck it, the WalMart $18 glasses frames are fine.
Radio is what I listen to for traffic reports while attempting to navigate home on my forty mile freeway commute. It would be nice if I had a small device I could listen to between my desk and the car over headphones to catch the 'traffic reports' early so I could listen to CDs for the trip home (cakeboxes of the cheapest possible CDR media are great for making throwaway copies to use in the car)
Then again, I sometimes listen to talk radio, switching from MPR to the local AM jabberstation, to counterpoise redneck and librul and achieve a sort of 'balanced coverage' (or Pacifica from a podcast if I really want and adventure in news)
I simply can't imagine listening to radio to hear 'music' (so to speak).
the screen is gorgeous still because I value it, and make sure I take care of it.
It sounds like you worship it, and keep it on it's own purple velvet pillow.
Do you have any idea how expensive disposable batteries are over time?
Probably about the $70 you spend. And I don't remain tethered to whatever recharging system you use. If the battery is getting a little low, pocket a spare AAA cell that day. If I want to be frugal or 'green' the cell pocketed is a rechargable. Best of all, if I forget to pocket a spare battery, I can buy one just about anywhere I go.
Have fun mailing in your Ipod and not having it for a few weeks while they're wiping it's memory and recasing it for you.
It goes beyond the actual price of an item and to whether an it is a particular high-theft.
My wife and I spent a bunch of time in a Frys not long ago. She needed a Leatherman for her work, so we threw one in the handbasket. Leatherman's are high theft items. She works in retail so is 'up' on these matters. She says we were watched by two and then three store detectives for the rest of the store visit. And we spent quite a while longer in the store, together and with me 'disappearing' for part of the time (I tend to jump around in the store looking at many items). We probably provided the exercise that day for all the employees.
You reinforced my point. Google releases the source tarball. The 'distro' fills in the gaps.
As soon as people start allowing major packages to be distributed binary-only the Open Source process screeches to a halt and we're all running 'dozeII.
Part of the problem is, native for which Linux? There are multiple OSes based on the Linux kernel, and they vary wildly, as to which hardware they run on and what underlying libraries and APIs they incorporate.
If Google wants to do it right, they need to release a cross-platform source tarball, and nothing less. A binary glob that only runs in version xx.xx of 'distro' xyzzy won't cut it.
Part of why I say this is that I run NetBSD, and said source tarball would be rolled into pkgsrc quickly, too. A binary blob that I have to run under Linux emulation wouldn't be nearly as nice.
The Hard-Core Ayn Rand enthusiasts who I have come across in real life (I am not talking about a bunch of sock-puppets in online discussions. Real people who meet regularly) bristle at the thought that they are libertarians.
You continue to rant. It kinda proves my point in a way. There are many 'factions' within both mainstream Political Parties in the US. Real change comes when people engage with the process as it exists.
You also need to stop arguing against parody opponents. I know it pleases you somehow to think I wouldn't know who Ron Paul is, but be displeased, I guess.
Grow up. Stop acting like 'the whole system is screwed' and you need to route around it.
I have three or four 8" floppy drives that still work.
A paper tape reader is actually a pretty trivial thing to construct. A high speed paper tape reader is the kind of thing someone with a machine shop could throw together in a few days.
I bought a machine at a University surplus auction recently that has an LSI-11 processor with a bunch of other stuff on two ISA cards, staked together and plugged into a 486 motherboard. The 486 motherboard has all the components to be a pee-cee, and there is a cable running down from the LSI-11 boards to a QBus card cage beneath in a separate compartment of the enclosure. I haven't had or spent the time to investigate it further, but intend to. It cost me $3 at the auction.
I got it in the same lot ($3 per 'box') with two other LSI-11 based machines which both look like 'earlier revision' versions of the same scientific instrument.
That is the reality. Don't pretend it isn't. Work to change that reality, but not in some dreamy way where you pretend that is not the reality.
You've gotta do more than withdraw into a little minority schism and rant there. Most likely, the 'two party system' has to be changed from within. If you're serious about changing it, figure out creative ways to do so. Don't just step outside 'the system' and tilt at windmills.
It's very self-fulfilling to go off on adventures, it must be acknowledged. Just not practical in face of reality.
That depends a lot on what is meant by 'computing resources.' Your desktop PC has the raw 'number crunching' ability to far exceed the resources being discussed.
But raw 'number crunching' is only a small part of it. How many operators can simultaneously use your desktop PC? How many media devices can it write to at a time? Does it have the antenna and transceiver attached?
People act like the fact that they can factor pi faster than ever before means they have a 'system' more powerful than the Mainframes of decades past, without understanding that it's 'peripherals peripherals peripherals' to paraphrase a monkeyboy rant from Redmond.
Well, what is libertarianism other than a way of "dealing with corrupt politicians"?
True. Libertarianism is an excellent way of 'dealing with corrupt politicians' by withdrawing from the system and copping a superior attitude. Which is fine, as long as people don't pretend it's anything other than that.
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Your anecdote had some value and added to the discussion. You described an abuse by one priest at one church. Your message was going somewhere. But you blew it in your fourth paragraph:
All churches are fucking crazy --
That doesn't follow smoothly from the previous three paragraphs. You'll need to provide more supporting evidence.
You somehow switched over from a mainstream branch of Christianity to examples from some creepy cultist sects.
It's even worse with me!! I was about to buy 5,000 Xbox 360's and give them to orphans.
Now, sniff... sniff... I'll have to buy something else!
For QA purposes, that would be a machine on which an OS had been installed for testing, and then wiped.
Africa is nominally attached to Asia, so is more properly defined as a peninsula.
Don't be an idiot. There are many uses for an older laptop, often running DOS.
I have one on a test bench at work right now. It logs the data coming out of the serial port of a PIC controller that I've set up to measure on/off cycles on appliance timers. All that was needed was the 'lowest end' laptop I could get IT to allocate out of their junkpile.
I also recently deployed two Dell Optiplexes as DOS machines for similar logging functions. It was faster just to partition 200 MB of the 8GB hard drives when running FDISK as that's more than will ever be needed for the DOS 5.0 install, and it's faster to only format a 200MB partition.
And for embedded system development, you just need a assembler and the tool to download code to program the target. Often there is a DOS version available. If you want to be able to task-switch between rom-burn/coding screens, throw Windows 3.1 on the machine to use as a task switcher.
You'd think from the attitude cast on this site sometimes that there were non-nerds present in the discussions.
Touch screens are also considerably less expensive to implement than well designed and durable physical switches. Physical switches on something that's gonna withstand an environment for extended periods require actual engineering (not just 'oh so fash' designers to make something that looks flashy.) It's a cheep thing, ya know. Look for more and more touch screens as companies compete to make cheaper and cheaper consumer-grade devices.
I would prefer we just kill all speculation with a single posting.
"Apple will not do anything particularly interesting in the foreseeable future" covers it pretty well.
Be careful. Some 'nerds' have outbuildings to keep their collections of cool stuff in. We live out in the country 'cuz the land and space is cheaper. We don't just collect classic Sun hardware, we also traffic in cool old kickstart (Maytag) gas engines, machine tools, large lab equipment, etc.
We're not particularly afraid of crime. We acknowledge that there are particular forms of dress than thugs tend to favor over 'normal' clothes almost to distinguish themselves. Regular 'black' and 'white' people don't need to wear costumes to look 'cool' or whatever it is. It's not a matter of race. It's a matter of not finding it interesting any longer to hang around people who are either thugs, or poseurs who dress like thugs to be 'cool.'
Nerds dress like nerds, ya know. Fuck it, the WalMart $18 glasses frames are fine.
Radio is what I listen to for traffic reports while attempting to navigate home on my forty mile freeway commute. It would be nice if I had a small device I could listen to between my desk and the car over headphones to catch the 'traffic reports' early so I could listen to CDs for the trip home (cakeboxes of the cheapest possible CDR media are great for making throwaway copies to use in the car)
Then again, I sometimes listen to talk radio, switching from MPR to the local AM jabberstation, to counterpoise redneck and librul and achieve a sort of 'balanced coverage' (or Pacifica from a podcast if I really want and adventure in news)
I simply can't imagine listening to radio to hear 'music' (so to speak).
the screen is gorgeous still because I value it, and make sure I take care of it.
It sounds like you worship it, and keep it on it's own purple velvet pillow.
Do you have any idea how expensive disposable batteries are over time?
Probably about the $70 you spend. And I don't remain tethered to whatever recharging system you use. If the battery is getting a little low, pocket a spare AAA cell that day. If I want to be frugal or 'green' the cell pocketed is a rechargable. Best of all, if I forget to pocket a spare battery, I can buy one just about anywhere I go.
Have fun mailing in your Ipod and not having it for a few weeks while they're wiping it's memory and recasing it for you.
It goes beyond the actual price of an item and to whether an it is a particular high-theft.
My wife and I spent a bunch of time in a Frys not long ago. She needed a Leatherman for her work, so we threw one in the handbasket. Leatherman's are high theft items. She works in retail so is 'up' on these matters. She says we were watched by two and then three store detectives for the rest of the store visit. And we spent quite a while longer in the store, together and with me 'disappearing' for part of the time (I tend to jump around in the store looking at many items). We probably provided the exercise that day for all the employees.
You reinforced my point. Google releases the source tarball. The 'distro' fills in the gaps.
As soon as people start allowing major packages to be distributed binary-only the Open Source process screeches to a halt and we're all running 'dozeII.
I'm not sure how good the Monkees really were, though. When I was growing up and they were a current band, they weren't taken that seriously.
The Sex Pistols did an excellent cover of 'Stepping Stone' though.
Let's think about a 4GB Nano-- getting 1000 songs for it means ripping ~100 CDs for $15 a pop (~$1500 worth of content)
On what planet did you grow up?
It means ripping ~100 CDs that you already own, that you check out of the library, that you borrow from friends (~$0 worth of content)
At the very least, it means someone you know springs $15 for the CD. Probably divided ten ways for the ten people who make copies.
If Google would release a source tarball, the community would do the porting work for them.
Part of the problem is, native for which Linux? There are multiple OSes based on the Linux kernel, and they vary wildly, as to which hardware they run on and what underlying libraries and APIs they incorporate.
If Google wants to do it right, they need to release a cross-platform source tarball, and nothing less. A binary glob that only runs in version xx.xx of 'distro' xyzzy won't cut it.
Part of why I say this is that I run NetBSD, and said source tarball would be rolled into pkgsrc quickly, too. A binary blob that I have to run under Linux emulation wouldn't be nearly as nice.
The Hard-Core Ayn Rand enthusiasts who I have come across in real life (I am not talking about a bunch of sock-puppets in online discussions. Real people who meet regularly) bristle at the thought that they are libertarians.
Go ahead and fulfill yourself. Have fun.
You continue to rant. It kinda proves my point in a way. There are many 'factions' within both mainstream Political Parties in the US. Real change comes when people engage with the process as it exists.
You also need to stop arguing against parody opponents. I know it pleases you somehow to think I wouldn't know who Ron Paul is, but be displeased, I guess.
Grow up. Stop acting like 'the whole system is screwed' and you need to route around it.
I wrote some and deployed some code just last week for a processor with 512 bytes of program memory and 24 bytes of RAM.
I have three or four 8" floppy drives that still work.
A paper tape reader is actually a pretty trivial thing to construct. A high speed paper tape reader is the kind of thing someone with a machine shop could throw together in a few days.
I bought a machine at a University surplus auction recently that has an LSI-11 processor with a bunch of other stuff on two ISA cards, staked together and plugged into a 486 motherboard. The 486 motherboard has all the components to be a pee-cee, and there is a cable running down from the LSI-11 boards to a QBus card cage beneath in a separate compartment of the enclosure. I haven't had or spent the time to investigate it further, but intend to. It cost me $3 at the auction.
I got it in the same lot ($3 per 'box') with two other LSI-11 based machines which both look like 'earlier revision' versions of the same scientific instrument.
That is the reality. Don't pretend it isn't. Work to change that reality, but not in some dreamy way where you pretend that is not the reality.
You've gotta do more than withdraw into a little minority schism and rant there. Most likely, the 'two party system' has to be changed from within. If you're serious about changing it, figure out creative ways to do so. Don't just step outside 'the system' and tilt at windmills.
It's very self-fulfilling to go off on adventures, it must be acknowledged. Just not practical in face of reality.
That depends a lot on what is meant by 'computing resources.' Your desktop PC has the raw 'number crunching' ability to far exceed the resources being discussed.
But raw 'number crunching' is only a small part of it. How many operators can simultaneously use your desktop PC? How many media devices can it write to at a time? Does it have the antenna and transceiver attached?
People act like the fact that they can factor pi faster than ever before means they have a 'system' more powerful than the Mainframes of decades past, without understanding that it's 'peripherals peripherals peripherals' to paraphrase a monkeyboy rant from Redmond.
Well, what is libertarianism other than a way of "dealing with corrupt politicians"?
True. Libertarianism is an excellent way of 'dealing with corrupt politicians' by withdrawing from the system and copping a superior attitude. Which is fine, as long as people don't pretend it's anything other than that.