There should be "splog" for blog spamming. Evidently some folks have turned off blog comment features because of spammers. (Guestbooks also tend to accumulate the equivalent of graffiti, so if they haven't already been targeted by spammers, I'm sure they will be shortly.)
magine a new CD or DVD format where the media doesn't have to be spun. Portable music / video players could be nearly solid-state and thus more durable and compact and require far less maintenance.
And chew up batteries, whose technology isn't advancing all that fast, at a lot slower rate, since it doesn't need to run that bulky motor.
See, that makes sense, but they already did that with Lilo & Stich, I believe.
Perhaps I'm not sure what you're saying they did with L&S. L&S was the first movie Disney did with watercolor since Dumbo (though they did go with 3D for the surfing segments, if memory serves).
This page claims that they will support Linux for the Volari V3, and elsewhere they claim to have a "unified" driver, so I would think that means there will be Linux support, if not open source drivers.
Windows I can play a DVD with any number of easily installable and functioning programs. Linux I killed myself getting 2 different programs to work. And they still have many issues.
That's weird. I found that building mplayer was pretty trivial, and ogle just worked.
Yes, there are things that need work--in part at least thanks to manufacturers who refuse to provide the info needed to write drivers and the like, and partly thanks to network effects that keep many app writers targeting Windows--but I'm not going back to Windows.
It's pretty rare that any industry manages to combine such technical feats with such beauty (the only other airplane I can think of that managed it was the blackbird), and it will be a huge loss to the skies.
In that case, the pleasure of looking at the XB-70 Valkyrie awaits you. IMHO the Valkyrie is even more beautiful than Concorde.
Exactly. Microsoft has no motivation to provide interoperability or compatibility--quite the contrary. They benefit by having the other guy perpetually playing catchup, so that the customer thinks "You know, I could avoid all this hassle by using Windows exclusively."
The goal for OSS is to make the customer think "You know, I could avoid all this hassle by using open source exclusively."
OK. Here's the process involved in the bible code: Start at some point in the Torah, and for various values of n, try picking every nth letter until you get something that can be interpreted as having to do with something of your own selection. Hebrew, like other Semitic languages, doesn't bother to write down vowels, so that gives you even more leeway in finding supposedly meaningful stuff--because you can count CN as CAN, COIN, etc.
With enough text, you can basically turn up anything you please. A code that can generate any message is worthless, and the bible code advocates will take their place along side the crackpots who think that Shakespeare's literary output encodes the name of some supposed real author, or lurid tales of the Elizabethan court. Too bad the Friedmans are no longer around to skewer these new cipher crackpots as they did the Shakespearean variety.
On a side note, we should not place 'psychics and other con-artists' together, because they are not the same.
This is true; there are psychics who are not con artists. OTOH, I have yet to see a psychic who can actually do the things he or she claims to be able to do without using the techniques that a con artist would use. If you have, by all means point them at James Randi's million dollar challenge.
What's really depressing about all this is that I, and I'm sure the rest of us, had hopes that the {Learning, Discovery, History} Channels wouldn't pander to the crackpots... and yet there I was the other week watching the History Channel put on a very credulous hour's worth of claptrap on the so-called "Bible Code."
Another key to making a distribution novice friendly is insuring that everything works out of the box, and Mandrake Linux 9.2 succeeds there.
...unless you have an ATI All-in-Wonder, which isn't set up to allow xawtv et al. to work. Is there any distribution that will do this? (Maybe not, though I'd love to hear of any that do; KNOPPIX, which is famed for its hardware detection, doesn't.)
I agree; surely one can just qualify "astronaut" with the appropriate proper adjective when it's needed. We didn't bother to find and use the Hebrew word for astronaut for the Israeli member of the Columbia's crew (alevasholem), did we?
(Besides, when I first heard the word, it sounded like someone was riding a really big drum into space...)
"Can he resist clicking on the bright, candy-colored window?"
"NO, I CAAAAAAN'T!"
Seriously, what's so great about the garish blue and red window dressing on Windows XP, and aren't you just suggesting imitation at a higher level of indirection? (Be innovative...just like Windows XP!)
I was a 6809 man myself (still have three CoCo 3s), but had a lot of friends with C64s. If memory serves, there was a nice structured language for the C-64 called COMAL; sort of did for the C64 what BASIC09 did for 6809-based machines... but what I thought way cool at the time was this: COMAL's author was from a Scandinavian country, and you could type DANSK and have it switch to Danish keywords.
The other amazing thing was the number of BBSs that ran on C64s, with their 1200 bps floppies.
You should listen to Charles Dodge's Earth's Magnetic Field some time...he took a whole pile of values of the "K index" and turned it into music. The results are very listenable (IMHO; your mileage may vary). It originally came out on vinyl on the Nonesuch label (or was it Vanguard?); if anyone knows of it on CD, I'd love to find out.
Yeah, but remember Gabriel's "Worse is Better," network effects, and the difficulty of unseating even a lousy product that occupies a given niche. (Not to say that X is lousy.)
I just went to www.iams.com, and have yet to see something that doesn't work for me under Mozilla (1.4, Gecko/20030701). Can you be more specific? I'll cheerfully send IAMS email about it, but precise info would help.
And of course we can all trust what you read somewhere, right?
There were plenty of articles on the order of Edith Efron's "Can the President Think?" (printed in Reason back in the early 90s) that questioned whether Clinton had anything other than a good memory in his favor.
We all have a tendency to think of our enemies as stupid... and succumbing to that tendency is stupid.
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There should be "splog" for blog spamming. Evidently some folks have turned off blog comment features because of spammers. (Guestbooks also tend to accumulate the equivalent of graffiti, so if they haven't already been targeted by spammers, I'm sure they will be shortly.)
magine a new CD or DVD format where the media doesn't have to be spun. Portable music / video players could be nearly solid-state and thus more durable and compact and require far less maintenance.
And chew up batteries, whose technology isn't advancing all that fast, at a lot slower rate, since it doesn't need to run that bulky motor.
When you try to nominate a robot, you get a "Bad/No Recipient" error page.
In any case--once it's up, IMHO Nilsson's robot "Shakey" deserves nomination.
See, that makes sense, but they already did that with Lilo & Stich, I believe.
Perhaps I'm not sure what you're saying they did with L&S. L&S was the first movie Disney did with watercolor since Dumbo (though they did go with 3D for the surfing segments, if memory serves).
This page claims that they will support Linux for the Volari V3, and elsewhere they claim to have a "unified" driver, so I would think that means there will be Linux support, if not open source drivers.
Windows I can play a DVD with any number of easily installable and functioning programs. Linux I killed myself getting 2 different programs to work. And they still have many issues.
That's weird. I found that building mplayer was pretty trivial, and ogle just worked.
Yes, there are things that need work--in part at least thanks to manufacturers who refuse to provide the info needed to write drivers and the like, and partly thanks to network effects that keep many app writers targeting Windows--but I'm not going back to Windows.
I'll bite. How can they leverage the Windows monopoly to impose these devices on everyone?
It's pretty rare that any industry manages to combine such technical feats with such beauty (the only other airplane I can think of that managed it was the blackbird), and it will be a huge loss to the skies.
In that case, the pleasure of looking at the XB-70 Valkyrie awaits you. IMHO the Valkyrie is even more beautiful than Concorde.
Exactly. Microsoft has no motivation to provide interoperability or compatibility--quite the contrary. They benefit by having the other guy perpetually playing catchup, so that the customer thinks "You know, I could avoid all this hassle by using Windows exclusively."
The goal for OSS is to make the customer think "You know, I could avoid all this hassle by using open source exclusively."
OK. Here's the process involved in the bible code: Start at some point in the Torah, and for various values of n, try picking every nth letter until you get something that can be interpreted as having to do with something of your own selection. Hebrew, like other Semitic languages, doesn't bother to write down vowels, so that gives you even more leeway in finding supposedly meaningful stuff--because you can count CN as CAN, COIN, etc.
With enough text, you can basically turn up anything you please. A code that can generate any message is worthless, and the bible code advocates will take their place along side the crackpots who think that Shakespeare's literary output encodes the name of some supposed real author, or lurid tales of the Elizabethan court. Too bad the Friedmans are no longer around to skewer these new cipher crackpots as they did the Shakespearean variety.
And, to be fair, the bible code is a moderately working therory... just neither a proven one, nor one that can ever have scientific acceptance.
The bible code is the textual equivalent of "Ooh, that cloud looks like a horsie."
No, the thing to do is to bring back Beakman's World ! With all due respect to Bill Nye, Beakman ruled.
On a side note, we should not place 'psychics and other con-artists' together, because they are not the same.
This is true; there are psychics who are not con artists. OTOH, I have yet to see a psychic who can actually do the things he or she claims to be able to do without using the techniques that a con artist would use. If you have, by all means point them at James Randi's million dollar challenge.
What's really depressing about all this is that I, and I'm sure the rest of us, had hopes that the {Learning, Discovery, History} Channels wouldn't pander to the crackpots... and yet there I was the other week watching the History Channel put on a very credulous hour's worth of claptrap on the so-called "Bible Code."
I agree; surely one can just qualify "astronaut" with the appropriate proper adjective when it's needed. We didn't bother to find and use the Hebrew word for astronaut for the Israeli member of the Columbia's crew (alevasholem), did we?
(Besides, when I first heard the word, it sounded like someone was riding a really big drum into space...)
If he uses OpenOffice at all, he will want 9.2, which has OpenOffice 1.1. After the 1.0.x routine of
click on the OO button
go have a cup of $BEVERAGE
edit document
the very quick startup of OO 1.1 is a GREAT relief.
"Can he resist clicking on the bright, candy-colored window?"
"NO, I CAAAAAAN'T!"
Seriously, what's so great about the garish blue and red window dressing on Windows XP, and aren't you just suggesting imitation at a higher level of indirection? (Be innovative...just like Windows XP!)
The FSF is evil for enforcing the GPL, as opposed to proprietary software companies, who are doing the right thing when they enforce their licenses.
I was a 6809 man myself (still have three CoCo 3s), but had a lot of friends with C64s. If memory serves, there was a nice structured language for the C-64 called COMAL; sort of did for the C64 what BASIC09 did for 6809-based machines... but what I thought way cool at the time was this: COMAL's author was from a Scandinavian country, and you could type DANSK and have it switch to Danish keywords.
The other amazing thing was the number of BBSs that ran on C64s, with their 1200 bps floppies.
Can you say "post hoc ergo propter hoc"? Sure...I knew you could.
Hmmm. I get my prescriptions filled at Walgreens. Perhaps I should go elsewhere, and let Walgreens know why.
You should listen to Charles Dodge's Earth's Magnetic Field some time...he took a whole pile of values of the "K index" and turned it into music. The results are very listenable (IMHO; your mileage may vary). It originally came out on vinyl on the Nonesuch label (or was it Vanguard?); if anyone knows of it on CD, I'd love to find out.
Yeah, but remember Gabriel's "Worse is Better," network effects, and the difficulty of unseating even a lousy product that occupies a given niche. (Not to say that X is lousy.)
I just went to www.iams.com, and have yet to see something that doesn't work for me under Mozilla (1.4, Gecko/20030701). Can you be more specific? I'll cheerfully send IAMS email about it, but precise info would help.
And of course we can all trust what you read somewhere, right?
There were plenty of articles on the order of Edith Efron's "Can the President Think?" (printed in Reason back in the early 90s) that questioned whether Clinton had anything other than a good memory in his favor.
We all have a tendency to think of our enemies as stupid... and succumbing to that tendency is stupid.