I was disappointed that my 6 year old dualband StarTac would no longer roam in-network on Verizon when I went to Dallas last week. Now I have to buy one of those crap $30 phones with crap voice quality or a $150 phone that's a $30 phone with $120 worth of useless crap and the same crap voice quality. Crap.
(BTW I live in SF Bay Area CA where the 800 mhz network is alive and well.)
>>> Blows my mind people are still wasting cycles over "find ET on my desktop."
But I know that in the unlikely event ET is ever found by seti@home, it will enrich Univ of California and meanwhile a student or two will get a fun research topic out of it.
All the biochem grid apps - who gets the money? I definitely don't want it to go to an already-rich cabal of doctors, lawyers, and drug companies.
I trusted Google to eventually get it right. There have been a few ups and downs but for me gmail is filtering my spam 99% correctly - it has been several weeks since a false positive and maybe one or two spams make it into the inbox each week.
It would be nice to have one-click whitelists.
The volume of spam has gone WAY WAY up. I'd say it's doubled since a month ago. It's coming to my "regular" email address though, not directly to gmail.
The glory days of SGI were well before the boom peaked. By 1999 the company was starting to fizzle. I worked there as a contractor just as the the glory days drew to a close and the mass layoffs began, 97-98. My $500 cheap-ass white box with a GEforce MX can outperform anything made in those days, at least until the cheap-ass fan melts or something lame like that.
Nevertheless, only a couple years ago I worked at a place where they were still buying used and new Octanes by the pallet load. The researchers had molecular-modeling tools that worked well on IRIX, and why change - these days hardware manufacturers go under faster than the complex software models one uses can be redone (and migrate all that legacy data!), then you can buy used for dirt-cheap. Eventually we figured out all the magic we needed to get OpenGL to outperform the Octanes on cheap-ass white boxes, and the takeover began...
Just move closer to the subject. Zoom lenses are wussy. I worked as a pro photographer for 5 years and although I owned a zoom lens (bought for $50 at a garage sale) it never came out of the bag. I use a Canon A-70 now and it spends 95% of its time zoomed all the way out - this is about the equivalent of a 35mm lens on a 35mm camera.
Optical zoom is particularly useless on a small-sensor camera because you are zooming in on few pixels - optical-zoom pictures on the A-70 look like crap and I leave it disabled all the time.
BTW Staying zoomed all the way out is somewhat useful in overcoming the time lag between shutter press and the time the picture is taken. Depth of field is much greater at wide (short focal length) zoom. Zoomed all the way out, you can manually focus the A-70 on infinity, the time lag is virtually eliminated, and everything more than a few dozen ft away is in focus.
"HELLO!" "I'M ON THE SUBWAY. WE'RE ABOUT TO GO INTO A TUNNEL!" "What?" "WHAT?" "I'M ON THE SUBWAY. WE'RE ABOUT TO GO INTO A TUNNEL!" "What?" "WHAT?" "I'M ON THE SUBWAY. WE'RE ABOUT TO GO INTO A TUNNEL" "What?" "WHAT?" "I'M ON THE SUBWAY. WE'RE ABOUT TO GO INTO A TUNNEL!"
Sheeesh. I so look forward to flying these days.
[ Substitute BART for 'subway' for Bay Area readers ]
One of the minor points in the article is that S-O empowers PHBs everywhere to think up even more ridiculous password policies that end up making everyone write their passwords down on paper. A typical post-S-O Domain password policy is to implement changes every three months that reuse no part of the original password. When you have 10+ passwords all with slightly different length and funny-character requirements you are just going to write them down.
Another example of a failed attempt to micro-regulate technology.
If you really wanted to get people's attention: A weekend spent picking up litter on the highway wearing an orange vest with "SOMEBODY GUESSED MY WEAK PASSWORD" on the back.
URL is same, with ?complete=1?
on
Google Suggest
·
· Score: 1
So it's going in the same front door as everything else. Back ends could be completely different though.
Like a previous poster says, the human eye has a finiat resolution. Of course there are always the people who spend $20K on a CD player and 0000-gauge speaker cables and claim they can hear the diference.
However, one application: A photographer could lay out all the items to be photographed for a catalog, for example, and then cover the assignment in one shot.
basically, though, The Man just wants you to keep buying ink cartridges.
1) For large-scale production work like school or league sports photos I would have gone 100% digital by now and invested the money in as good a digital camera as I could afford, then outsourced the printing or maybe done it myself if volume was sufficient. I would never have sufficient hours to scan in film.
2) For small-scale work like photojournalism maybe still use film, shoot color negative film and send the film to Ofoto or equivalent for $4 per roll processing and low-res index-scanning. Present the Ofoto images to customers, then scan in hi-res from my negative using a good slide/film scanner. Maybe still shoot Kodachrome slide film, keep slides, and scan in hi-res the 1 out of 1000 pictures worth making hi-res scans of.
Like previous posters have said, flatbeds suck for production work. If you are running your photogrpahy as a business, a good slide/film scanner with at least 12 bits per channel is deductable/depreciatable and essential. Now that I am "retired" I get good-enough amateur-quality results with my old cheap-ass Minolta Dual-scan. It's only 8 bits per channel, though, and for some pictures that sucks. No Open source driver yet I know of - I scan with a Mac and transfer the file to Gimp for touching up.
When we applied for a home loan three years ago, our Fair Isaac score (? - might have been a generic score) was reduced about 10 or 20 points for "excessive credit report requests" or some such. Probably related to background checks from all the different employers I have contracted for. Out broker said our score was high enough that it didn't matter, and we refinanced anyway a shot time later.
Offtopic: Since nearly everyone on/. has been looking for employment at some point in the past few years why are we asking all these questions? We all qualify under the old law, sheesh!
I was unable to view any info yesterday. Eventually I got a PDF from the Equifax site that I can mail in to make the request.
For those unable to log in, the annualcreditreport.com site first asks for personal information then redirects one at a time to the three big agencies.
This new law really sounds like the "harvesting email addresses" act since you have to provide email addresses to create an online account at each of the three agencies to view your report online. I was unable to get it to work any any of the three.
I've had all kinds of little crappy brick phones assigned to me at work, and none even came close in voice quality to my 5 year old Star-Tac. Since replacements are available on Ebay for cheap, I'll probably keep one forever.
Zap has been selling the Razor electric scooter line for since I first saw them online in 96 or so - they also carried the Corbin Sparrow line IIRC and have various other electric vehicles for sale.
I don't think you will be able to mailorder a Smart car. If they are so cool why aren't DaimlerChrysler dealers offering them? In the SF Bay area the could mark them up $5K and still sell out.
Even dorkier, but still cool - does he buy an airplane seat for the thing every time he takes a long airplace flight, so he can see first hand the effects of relativity. I mean, what's the point of making it portable otherwise?
.. is what it's all about. There are cameras in every SF Bay Area (CA) subway car, with silly little flashing LEDs that I'm sure serve no purpose other than to make people aware that somewhere there is some overpaid BART droid who gets $90,000 per year to rewind the VCR cartridges in every train car.
This is a good idea and all, but the bottom line is that American Business is a crack whore for Outlook, the One True App with which they cannot live without.
Until Open Source has a killer mail reader app this will be an uphill struggle.
Let the pedantic quibbling about what is the best mail client begin!
A tad overpriced, but you could take one of these Netra 1280s I'm managing, tie it to a chain on the back of your truck, and drag it down the freeway for 10 miles without it being the worse for wear.
I'm sick of fooling around with cheap-ass Dell and ex-Compaq DL-series hardware. Of course developers are getting better at writing 100% cluster-capable applications and thus life with cheap hardware is getting better, but it always seems some boxes are mission-critical regardless.
We have a new toy, a rack-full of HP blades. They are running Linux. Seems like the best of both worlds - a high-end box, and Linux with drivers engineered specifically for the HW by the vendor. Sun is a little behind in this respect, but I don't see them gaining.
Slashdot Mirror
I was disappointed that my 6 year old dualband StarTac would no longer roam in-network on Verizon when I went to Dallas last week. Now I have to buy one of those crap $30 phones with crap voice quality or a $150 phone that's a $30 phone with $120 worth of useless crap and the same crap voice quality. Crap.
(BTW I live in SF Bay Area CA where the 800 mhz network is alive and well.)
>>> Blows my mind people are still wasting cycles over "find ET on my desktop."
But I know that in the unlikely event ET is ever found by seti@home, it will enrich Univ of California and meanwhile a student or two will get a fun research topic out of it.
All the biochem grid apps - who gets the money? I definitely don't want it to go to an already-rich cabal of doctors, lawyers, and drug companies.
I trusted Google to eventually get it right. There have been a few ups and downs but for me gmail is filtering my spam 99% correctly - it has been several weeks since a false positive and maybe one or two spams make it into the inbox each week.
It would be nice to have one-click whitelists.
The volume of spam has gone WAY WAY up. I'd say it's doubled since a month ago. It's coming to my "regular" email address though, not directly to gmail.
You're right. Sheesh, what was I thinking. Not enough coffee yesterday.
I still don't use zoom though. Optical or digital.
The glory days of SGI were well before the boom peaked. By 1999 the company was starting to fizzle. I worked there as a contractor just as the the glory days drew to a close and the mass layoffs began, 97-98. My $500 cheap-ass white box with a GEforce MX can outperform anything made in those days, at least until the cheap-ass fan melts or something lame like that.
Nevertheless, only a couple years ago I worked at a place where they were still buying used and new Octanes by the pallet load. The researchers had molecular-modeling tools that worked well on IRIX, and why change - these days hardware manufacturers go under faster than the complex software models one uses can be redone (and migrate all that legacy data!), then you can buy used for dirt-cheap. Eventually we figured out all the magic we needed to get OpenGL to outperform the Octanes on cheap-ass white boxes, and the takeover began...
Just move closer to the subject. Zoom lenses are wussy. I worked as a pro photographer for 5 years and although I owned a zoom lens (bought for $50 at a garage sale) it never came out of the bag. I use a Canon A-70 now and it spends 95% of its time zoomed all the way out - this is about the equivalent of a 35mm lens on a 35mm camera.
Optical zoom is particularly useless on a small-sensor camera because you are zooming in on few pixels - optical-zoom pictures on the A-70 look like crap and I leave it disabled all the time.
BTW Staying zoomed all the way out is somewhat useful in overcoming the time lag between shutter press and the time the picture is taken. Depth of field is much greater at wide (short focal length) zoom. Zoomed all the way out, you can manually focus the A-70 on infinity, the time lag is virtually eliminated, and everything more than a few dozen ft away is in focus.
I'm sure airlines will be do different:
"HELLO!" "I'M ON THE SUBWAY. WE'RE ABOUT TO GO INTO A TUNNEL!" "What?" "WHAT?" "I'M ON THE SUBWAY. WE'RE ABOUT TO GO INTO A TUNNEL!" "What?" "WHAT?" "I'M ON THE SUBWAY. WE'RE ABOUT TO GO INTO A TUNNEL" "What?" "WHAT?"
"I'M ON THE SUBWAY. WE'RE ABOUT TO GO INTO A TUNNEL!"
Sheeesh. I so look forward to flying these days.
[ Substitute BART for 'subway' for Bay Area readers ]
One of the minor points in the article is that S-O empowers PHBs everywhere to think up even more ridiculous password policies that end up making everyone write their passwords down on paper. A typical post-S-O Domain password policy is to implement changes every three months that reuse no part of the original password. When you have 10+ passwords all with slightly different length and funny-character requirements you are just going to write them down.
Another example of a failed attempt to micro-regulate technology.
If you really wanted to get people's attention: A weekend spent picking up litter on the highway wearing an orange vest with "SOMEBODY GUESSED MY WEAK PASSWORD" on the back.
So it's going in the same front door as everything else. Back ends could be completely different though.
Like a previous poster says, the human eye has a finiat resolution. Of course there are always the people who spend $20K on a CD player and 0000-gauge speaker cables and claim they can hear the diference.
However, one application: A photographer could lay out all the items to be photographed for a catalog, for example, and then cover the assignment in one shot.
basically, though, The Man just wants you to keep buying ink cartridges.
Well, an md5sum has only 16^32 possible values, possibly less (I don't know the algorithm exactly), so it was only a matter of time.
>>> Where do I go to collect my prize?
I modded you up, you greedy so-and-so. Sheesh, isn't that good enough for you people?
Best explanation so far IMHO.
>>>> ... a good criminal will have the drive auto-erase if it doesn't get a password in a certain amount of time, etc.
A good criminal will have the machine be sure to delete every trace of evidence if it reboots or power cycles.
Secure the machine to avoid further damage, but don't just yank the power cord out of the wall.
I would either:
1) For large-scale production work like school or league sports photos I would have gone 100% digital by now and invested the money in as good a digital camera as I could afford, then outsourced the printing or maybe done it myself if volume was sufficient. I would never have sufficient hours to scan in film.
2) For small-scale work like photojournalism maybe still use film, shoot color negative film and send the film to Ofoto or equivalent for $4 per roll processing and low-res index-scanning. Present the Ofoto images to customers, then scan in hi-res from my negative using a good slide/film scanner. Maybe still shoot Kodachrome slide film, keep slides, and scan in hi-res the 1 out of 1000 pictures worth making hi-res scans of.
Like previous posters have said, flatbeds suck for production work. If you are running your photogrpahy as a business, a good slide/film scanner with at least 12 bits per channel is deductable/depreciatable and essential. Now that I am "retired" I get good-enough amateur-quality results with my old cheap-ass Minolta Dual-scan. It's only 8 bits per channel, though, and for some pictures that sucks. No Open source driver yet I know of - I scan with a Mac and transfer the file to Gimp for touching up.
http://weather.gov/radar/images/DS.p19r0/SI.kmux/l atest.gif
For KMUX radar. Replace "kmux" your own local radar code.
>> can someone care to explain ?
/. has been looking for employment at some point in the past few years why are we asking all these questions? We all qualify under the old law, sheesh!
When we applied for a home loan three years ago, our Fair Isaac score (? - might have been a generic score) was reduced about 10 or 20 points for "excessive credit report requests" or some such. Probably related to background checks from all the different employers I have contracted for. Out broker said our score was high enough that it didn't matter, and we refinanced anyway a shot time later.
Offtopic: Since nearly everyone on
I was unable to view any info yesterday. Eventually I got a PDF from the Equifax site that I can mail in to make the request.
For those unable to log in, the annualcreditreport.com site first asks for personal information then redirects one at a time to the three big agencies.
This new law really sounds like the "harvesting email addresses" act since you have to provide email addresses to create an online account at each of the three agencies to view your report online. I was unable to get it to work any any of the three.
I've had all kinds of little crappy brick phones assigned to me at work, and none even came close in voice quality to my 5 year old Star-Tac. Since replacements are available on Ebay for cheap, I'll probably keep one forever.
Zap has been selling the Razor electric scooter line for since I first saw them online in 96 or so - they also carried the Corbin Sparrow line IIRC and have various other electric vehicles for sale.
I don't think you will be able to mailorder a Smart car. If they are so cool why aren't DaimlerChrysler dealers offering them? In the SF Bay area the could mark them up $5K and still sell out.
. . . since in the past they have come up with footage of incidents to release to the press...
Even dorkier, but still cool - does he buy an airplane seat for the thing every time he takes a long airplace flight, so he can see first hand the effects of relativity. I mean, what's the point of making it portable otherwise?
.. is what it's all about. There are cameras in every SF Bay Area (CA) subway car, with silly little flashing LEDs that I'm sure serve no purpose other than to make people aware that somewhere there is some overpaid BART droid who gets $90,000 per year to rewind the VCR cartridges in every train car.
This is a good idea and all, but the bottom line is that American Business is a crack whore for Outlook, the One True App with which they cannot live without.
Until Open Source has a killer mail reader app this will be an uphill struggle.
Let the pedantic quibbling about what is the best mail client begin!
Buy colorful LEDs.
Babes waiting in lines, maybe.
HTTPS?!?
A tad overpriced, but you could take one of these Netra 1280s I'm managing, tie it to a chain on the back of your truck, and drag it down the freeway for 10 miles without it being the worse for wear.
I'm sick of fooling around with cheap-ass Dell and ex-Compaq DL-series hardware. Of course developers are getting better at writing 100% cluster-capable applications and thus life with cheap hardware is getting better, but it always seems some boxes are mission-critical regardless.
We have a new toy, a rack-full of HP blades. They are running Linux. Seems like the best of both worlds - a high-end box, and Linux with drivers engineered specifically for the HW by the vendor. Sun is a little behind in this respect, but I don't see them gaining.