Oh, thanks a LOT! The thought of emulating this beast brought back 20-year-old memories of the Univac 1100, with its Fieldata character set, quarter-word mode, the 1701 keypunch (and its "chad collector tray"), and the ever popular
ER AREAD$
system call.
You know that sinking feeling you get when you realize you've just done an "rm -rf" on the wrong directory? That's very similar to the feeling you get just after hearing the splat of your card deck dropping into a puddle.
I suffer from audio-multiple-personality-disorder.
The audiophile (diminished significantly by 20 years of highway commuting) yearns for the listening room free of parallel surfaces or right angles, containing only a turntable, preamp, monoblocks, speakers and me. That guy spent a few years as a consultant to a high-end dealer, evaluating new gear he was thinking of selling. (Bad eyesight, good hearing.) And the turntable better not damage the records either.
The home theater guy only cares about something that plays all the things I need to play, with relative simplicity. Video fidelity is much more important to him than audio fidelity.
The DJ doesn't care a whit about fidelity. His rig plays loudly, reasonably well, and with unshakable reliability. He doesn't mind that a record will only last about a dozen plays on the 1200 with the Stanton cartridge.
But if there's one thing that playing around in high-end audio has taught me, it's that being exposed to the $100K systems also exposed me to $2500 systems that would beat the pants off the trash you'd spend $2500 on at Circuit City.
High end is not synonymous with high price.
Re:Maybe, but not as much as you'd think
on
Insanely Audiophile
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· Score: 1
Of all the snake oil salesmen in high end audio...
Tivo is a useless piece of junk compared to a VCR, for archiving.
That's why the Sony TiVos can drive Sony VCRs. Want to archive something TiVo recorded? Throw in a blank tape, select the program from The List, and do a "save to VCR".
(Too bad it only works for Sony VCRs, though.)
Re:Any screenshots of the updated skin ?
on
Mozilla 0.9.1 Out
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· Score: 1
I like it too, but I wish they'd keep the color on the buttons all the time instead of doing that IE-like color-only-on-mouse-over.
TiVo had the 30 second skip ahead function and disabled it.
I have a VCR with a 30-second skip, and a (Sony) TiVo.
The problem with manual fast-forwarding is that when you reach the point where you want to resume normal speed, it takes a little time to push the button (and in the case of a VCR, for the tape to slow down), so you "skid" past where you want to be, and have to back up. One of TiVo's coolest features is when you fast-forward at 10x, then resume normal speed, it backs up a couple seconds, almost always leaving you right where you wanted to be.
With that feature, it takes as little or less effort to skip commercials with TiVo than it does with the 30-second skip button on the VCR.
In order to make room for all of these memory slots they are located on a riser card that sticks up out of the board. This unfortunately means that there is no hope of getting [the MB] to fit in anything smaller than a 4U or 5U rackmountable case.
So what's stopping someone from using a little adapter and some standoffs to have the riser board sit above and parallel to the MB? (of course, you'd need a different CPU fan, but for a 2U or 3U box, you've got to completely rethink airflow anyway.)
Inquiring Dremel-wielding hardware h4XXors want to know.
It's not just Linux, but how it's used
on
Linux and Shrek
·
· Score: 1
What makes this interesting is that they're not just using Linux to build cheap renderfarms, but they're also using it for the original animation work, implying that Alias/Wavefront et al see Linux as a viable platform to port their high-end tools to.
I envision P2P file-sharing (Gnutella, or the like) to replace root servers
Why not use something like this to get rid of TLDs altogether? Instead of
I want to go to "www.debian.org"
why not go to "Debian"? You could also use a mechanism like this to differentiate Apple Computer from Apple Records, and maybe also to localize yourself, e.g., yahoo.com vs. yahoo.co.uk.
I suspect that'll be the Next Big Thing as DNS gets so complicated, fragmented and self-overlapping that remembering conventional URLs ceases to be much easier than remembering numeric IP addresses (or your friends' yahoo/hotmail/AOL email addresses of the week).
Re:Do you have an 'S' on your shirt?
on
RFC for Spammers
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· Score: 2
My standard answer to unsolicited telephone sales reps is "I never do business over the phone."
I used to say that, too, until some wiseacre telemarketer said, "You mean you don't call the gas company, cable company, police?" I then switched to saying, "I never do business with telemarketers." You'd be amazed at the lengths these jerks will go to trying to convince me they're not really telemarketers.
These days, as soon as my telemarketer detector goes off, I interrupt them with "Please put me on your 'do not call' list." The consistent politeness with which they say, "Right away, sir," tells me that the poor phone droids don't get penalized for this the way they do for a lost sale. And only once have I gotten a repeat call after using those magic words.
ObTopic: Does anyone know of an email client whose filtering mechanism allows me to compare fields, e.g., "if ${From:} == ${To:}..."?
It's even better than that. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopes have extremely strong superconducting magnets, cooled by liquid nitrogen, or liquid helium or some such.
Normally these magnets do almost no work--they move things around a proton at a time. If they do macroscopic work, such as when some idiot brings a ferrous tool into the NMR room and lets it clang against the side of the magnet, the magnet "quenches", usually dumping coolant all over the floor.
You REALLY don't want this to happen, because after cleaning up the mess, you have to go through a godawful restart sequence.
So, the name "Magnequench" has the same disaster imagery as the "MaxiCrash Disk Drive Company", or "Microsoft".
(Disclaimer, I am not an NMR spectroscopist, but my wife used to be one.)
It's already homogenized. When the FCC relaxed its restrictions on station ownership, big radio conglomerates like Westwood One snapped up small-market stations in droves.
That's why radio in so many small towns changed from the audio equivalent of the local paper by local people to USA Today. Nothing but bland lite-whatever, and lowest-common-denominator talk show cesspools. The station owners love it though, because they don't have to worry about their own content any more. Just sell a few ads to Clovis's Barbershop and Ledbetter's Used Cars, and you're done.
What little local-origination programming there is left in Heartland America is so down-home it makes Hee Haw look like Firing Line. No news except for syndication of the CNN Headline News audio track, with the occasional break for tornado warnings. Farm reports. Preaching. Maybe the token "public radio" classical top 40.
If that's where I still lived, I'd gladly pay for some decent content. Or lots of CDs.
Severity is in the eye of the beholder, and thus should always be classified in terms of its impact on the users of the software
Beg to differ.
We've always used two classifications, severity and sensitivity, with the latter being the "eye of the beholder" measure. You can have a severity one bug ("nobody goes home until it's fixed") that a customer may never see, but if they do it'll be a disaster. That would be high severity, low sensitivity.
You can also have cosmetic problems that don't affect the overall operation of the system, but they still piss the customers off something fierce--these would be low severity, high sensitivity.
Keeping these distinct helps prevent the severity from correlating too closely with how loudly the engineers are being cursed. It also helps prioritze things differently based on where you are in the release cycle.
An HP spokeswoman insisted that such measures "have an impact on the bottom line" but wouldn't specify.
Untaken paid vacation time is a liability on the corporate balance sheet. Mandatory vacation time reduces the overall amount of it, hence improves the bottom line.
Secondarily, taking vacation time (years) later implies that the company will have to pay more, because of intervening raises.
This is part of why companies limit the total amount of vacation time an employee can accrue.
Re:Ehh, there is a myth about this myth..
on
What 1.7Ghz Is Like
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· Score: 2
SGIs have very fast buses which is a huge help...
Not only that, but their filesystem code can keep those buses filled with bits. Their filesystem overhead is the lowest you'll find anywhere.
It's amazing how fast a machine goes when the OS gets out of the way...
Re:Free e-mail Services and Spam
on
Buried in email?
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· Score: 2
From: lines on spam are almost always forged
But wait, there's more!
Since a lot of email gateway machines now do address checking of From: headers, newer spamming software picks (randomly, I think) an address from the list to put in the From: header.
That has three effects:
If anything tries to filter nonexistent From: addresses, the spam gets through as long as the randomly picked address is indeed valid.
The poor schlub whose address got put into the From: header gets all the bounce messages generated by the original spam.
People can naively presume that the address in the From: header really does belong to the spammer, possibly forcing that address's owner to answer some difficult questions from their ISP or employer.
The last time this happened to me, I got over a thousand bounce messages. I immediately documented the hell out of it and reported it to my employer, going to them before they came to me.
Doesn't anyone remember the paper memo and all the nonsense we had to go through
Hear, hear!
Back before spam, I worked at a Very Large Company That Isn't So Large Any More Because They Trivested. At one point, TPTB decided to make each organization separately accountable for its existence--pay your own way--which meant they had to have some tangible internal or external source of funding. This applied to everything from product development to the mailroom.
So, system admin organizations would advertise to try to convince you to let them admin your machines for a fee, that sort of thing. The advertising was in the form of paper that was sent to every single person's (physical) inbox. The worst was the training organization, who would send out a separate piece of paper for every occurrence of every class ("Introduction to vi", May 2, 9:00-5:00). At the worst of it we were getting 2-3 paper adverts per day.
Thousands of reams of paper per year, unread, from the inbox to the recycle bin. Saved them TONS of money. Uh-huh. Right.
If the NY Times gave me a choice of either paying for access to their site or enduring more intrusive ads than they have now, I'd reach for my credit card.
The problem here is that it works for the Times, whose content is consistently useful to me. I'm less likely to pay for thestreet.com, because I can't be as sure that I'll get my money's worth (this I learned from their free 30-day trial). But thestreet.com might one day have that golden nugget that makes the whole thing worthwhile.
What really makes my blood boil is having to endure advertising on seemingly any printable surface. Now they're pasting ads on floors, gas station squeegee handles, and even baggage carousels (not above them, the actual segments your suitcase slides over--no way to look away).
You have one guess as to why I never want an internet-connected refrigerator!
Why do people ask legal advice on weblogs where a real lawyer is essential?
Because sometimes what they're really trying to find out is if a lawyer really is essential.
For example, if I asked here, "I just got a speeding ticket; should I fight it," most people would probably say, "Don't bother; you'll waste the legal fees and still have to pay the ticket." Granted, a good lawyer would tell you the same thing, and an ethical one wouldn't bill you for telling you that, but you get the point.
That's more like legal meta-advice. The legal meta-advice in this thread has been, "Yes, get a lawyer; this is too sticky for mere mortals to figure out, or fight in Tax Court."
We restrict minors because they're not (by whatever definition) "grown up". Obviously, picking the arbitrary age of 18 does not accurately measure the maturity of every single person, but it's close enough by U.S. society's standards. OTOH, there's no age that is even that accurate at telling when someone has "grown down" enough to start restricting them again.
Well, I have an 8K bit core plane in front of me right now. It's 5 inches square and about twice the thickness of a typical PC board.
It weighs maybe 100 grams. There are cores on both sides, holes for nine mounting screws, and contacts on all edges of the board--installing it must have been a PITA.
This one was manufactured by a company called FabriTek sometime in the late 1970's, probably a third-party replacement or OEM for IBM, CDC or Univac. The cores, each about the size of a period on a (10pt) printed page, were pressed in Minnesota, then shipped to some far east sweatshop, where they were strung by hand, as were almost all core planes. Each core has three wires running through it.
Half a gig would require over 524,000 of these. Worse, these are the bare cores and the wires. The interface circuitry would be somewhere else.
So yes, I can imagine it, but doing so is giving me a headache, so I'll STFU now.
Slashdot Mirror
ER AREAD$
system call.
You know that sinking feeling you get when you realize you've just done an "rm -rf" on the wrong directory? That's very similar to the feeling you get just after hearing the splat of your card deck dropping into a puddle.
The audiophile (diminished significantly by 20 years of highway commuting) yearns for the listening room free of parallel surfaces or right angles, containing only a turntable, preamp, monoblocks, speakers and me. That guy spent a few years as a consultant to a high-end dealer, evaluating new gear he was thinking of selling. (Bad eyesight, good hearing.) And the turntable better not damage the records either.
The home theater guy only cares about something that plays all the things I need to play, with relative simplicity. Video fidelity is much more important to him than audio fidelity.
The DJ doesn't care a whit about fidelity. His rig plays loudly, reasonably well, and with unshakable reliability. He doesn't mind that a record will only last about a dozen plays on the 1200 with the Stanton cartridge.
But if there's one thing that playing around in high-end audio has taught me, it's that being exposed to the $100K systems also exposed me to $2500 systems that would beat the pants off the trash you'd spend $2500 on at Circuit City.
High end is not synonymous with high price.
Two words: Tice clock.
That's why the Sony TiVos can drive Sony VCRs. Want to archive something TiVo recorded? Throw in a blank tape, select the program from The List, and do a "save to VCR".
(Too bad it only works for Sony VCRs, though.)
I like it too, but I wish they'd keep the color on the buttons all the time instead of doing that IE-like color-only-on-mouse-over.
I have a VCR with a 30-second skip, and a (Sony) TiVo.
The problem with manual fast-forwarding is that when you reach the point where you want to resume normal speed, it takes a little time to push the button (and in the case of a VCR, for the tape to slow down), so you "skid" past where you want to be, and have to back up. One of TiVo's coolest features is when you fast-forward at 10x, then resume normal speed, it backs up a couple seconds, almost always leaving you right where you wanted to be.
With that feature, it takes as little or less effort to skip commercials with TiVo than it does with the 30-second skip button on the VCR.
In order to make room for all of these memory slots they are located on a riser card that sticks up out of the board. This unfortunately means that there is no hope of getting [the MB] to fit in anything smaller than a 4U or 5U rackmountable case.
So what's stopping someone from using a little adapter and some standoffs to have the riser board sit above and parallel to the MB? (of course, you'd need a different CPU fan, but for a 2U or 3U box, you've got to completely rethink airflow anyway.)
Inquiring Dremel-wielding hardware h4XXors want to know.
What makes this interesting is that they're not just using Linux to build cheap renderfarms, but they're also using it for the original animation work, implying that Alias/Wavefront et al see Linux as a viable platform to port their high-end tools to.
Why not use something like this to get rid of TLDs altogether? Instead of
I want to go to "www.debian.org"
why not go to "Debian"? You could also use a mechanism like this to differentiate Apple Computer from Apple Records, and maybe also to localize yourself, e.g., yahoo.com vs. yahoo.co.uk.
I suspect that'll be the Next Big Thing as DNS gets so complicated, fragmented and self-overlapping that remembering conventional URLs ceases to be much easier than remembering numeric IP addresses (or your friends' yahoo/hotmail/AOL email addresses of the week).
I used to say that, too, until some wiseacre telemarketer said, "You mean you don't call the gas company, cable company, police?" I then switched to saying, "I never do business with telemarketers." You'd be amazed at the lengths these jerks will go to trying to convince me they're not really telemarketers.
These days, as soon as my telemarketer detector goes off, I interrupt them with "Please put me on your 'do not call' list." The consistent politeness with which they say, "Right away, sir," tells me that the poor phone droids don't get penalized for this the way they do for a lost sale. And only once have I gotten a repeat call after using those magic words.
ObTopic: Does anyone know of an email client whose filtering mechanism allows me to compare fields, e.g., "if ${From:} == ${To:}..."?
Right--and too bad about whatever was on the floor when the spill happened...
Normally these magnets do almost no work--they move things around a proton at a time. If they do macroscopic work, such as when some idiot brings a ferrous tool into the NMR room and lets it clang against the side of the magnet, the magnet "quenches", usually dumping coolant all over the floor.
You REALLY don't want this to happen, because after cleaning up the mess, you have to go through a godawful restart sequence.
So, the name "Magnequench" has the same disaster imagery as the "MaxiCrash Disk Drive Company", or "Microsoft".
(Disclaimer, I am not an NMR spectroscopist, but my wife used to be one.)
That's why radio in so many small towns changed from the audio equivalent of the local paper by local people to USA Today. Nothing but bland lite-whatever, and lowest-common-denominator talk show cesspools. The station owners love it though, because they don't have to worry about their own content any more. Just sell a few ads to Clovis's Barbershop and Ledbetter's Used Cars, and you're done.
What little local-origination programming there is left in Heartland America is so down-home it makes Hee Haw look like Firing Line. No news except for syndication of the CNN Headline News audio track, with the occasional break for tornado warnings. Farm reports. Preaching. Maybe the token "public radio" classical top 40.
If that's where I still lived, I'd gladly pay for some decent content. Or lots of CDs.
Beg to differ.
We've always used two classifications, severity and sensitivity, with the latter being the "eye of the beholder" measure. You can have a severity one bug ("nobody goes home until it's fixed") that a customer may never see, but if they do it'll be a disaster. That would be high severity, low sensitivity.
You can also have cosmetic problems that don't affect the overall operation of the system, but they still piss the customers off something fierce--these would be low severity, high sensitivity.
Keeping these distinct helps prevent the severity from correlating too closely with how loudly the engineers are being cursed. It also helps prioritze things differently based on where you are in the release cycle.
Untaken paid vacation time is a liability on the corporate balance sheet. Mandatory vacation time reduces the overall amount of it, hence improves the bottom line.
Secondarily, taking vacation time (years) later implies that the company will have to pay more, because of intervening raises.
This is part of why companies limit the total amount of vacation time an employee can accrue.
Sounds like an anti-aging face cream...
Not only that, but their filesystem code can keep those buses filled with bits. Their filesystem overhead is the lowest you'll find anywhere.
It's amazing how fast a machine goes when the OS gets out of the way...
But wait, there's more!
Since a lot of email gateway machines now do address checking of From: headers, newer spamming software picks (randomly, I think) an address from the list to put in the From: header.
That has three effects:
The last time this happened to me, I got over a thousand bounce messages. I immediately documented the hell out of it and reported it to my employer, going to them before they came to me.
Hear, hear!
Back before spam, I worked at a Very Large Company That Isn't So Large Any More Because They Trivested. At one point, TPTB decided to make each organization separately accountable for its existence--pay your own way--which meant they had to have some tangible internal or external source of funding. This applied to everything from product development to the mailroom.
So, system admin organizations would advertise to try to convince you to let them admin your machines for a fee, that sort of thing. The advertising was in the form of paper that was sent to every single person's (physical) inbox. The worst was the training organization, who would send out a separate piece of paper for every occurrence of every class ("Introduction to vi", May 2, 9:00-5:00). At the worst of it we were getting 2-3 paper adverts per day.
Thousands of reams of paper per year, unread, from the inbox to the recycle bin. Saved them TONS of money. Uh-huh. Right.
If the NY Times gave me a choice of either paying for access to their site or enduring more intrusive ads than they have now, I'd reach for my credit card.
The problem here is that it works for the Times, whose content is consistently useful to me. I'm less likely to pay for thestreet.com, because I can't be as sure that I'll get my money's worth (this I learned from their free 30-day trial). But thestreet.com might one day have that golden nugget that makes the whole thing worthwhile.
What really makes my blood boil is having to endure advertising on seemingly any printable surface. Now they're pasting ads on floors, gas station squeegee handles, and even baggage carousels (not above them, the actual segments your suitcase slides over--no way to look away).
You have one guess as to why I never want an internet-connected refrigerator!
Dunno about Ygg's specific products, but DVD-ROMs can be made using the ISO-9660 file system (with or without Rock Ridge, Joliet, etc.).
DVD-ROM does not imply UDF.
Because sometimes what they're really trying to find out is if a lawyer really is essential.
For example, if I asked here, "I just got a speeding ticket; should I fight it," most people would probably say, "Don't bother; you'll waste the legal fees and still have to pay the ticket." Granted, a good lawyer would tell you the same thing, and an ethical one wouldn't bill you for telling you that, but you get the point.
That's more like legal meta-advice. The legal meta-advice in this thread has been, "Yes, get a lawyer; this is too sticky for mere mortals to figure out, or fight in Tax Court."
Nothing wrong with that.
We restrict minors because they're not (by whatever definition) "grown up". Obviously, picking the arbitrary age of 18 does not accurately measure the maturity of every single person, but it's close enough by U.S. society's standards. OTOH, there's no age that is even that accurate at telling when someone has "grown down" enough to start restricting them again.
This one was manufactured by a company called FabriTek sometime in the late 1970's, probably a third-party replacement or OEM for IBM, CDC or Univac. The cores, each about the size of a period on a (10pt) printed page, were pressed in Minnesota, then shipped to some far east sweatshop, where they were strung by hand, as were almost all core planes. Each core has three wires running through it.
Half a gig would require over 524,000 of these. Worse, these are the bare cores and the wires. The interface circuitry would be somewhere else.
So yes, I can imagine it, but doing so is giving me a headache, so I'll STFU now.
Yeah, PBS puts theirs at the beginning and end.