It's not tricky but it's getting quite tiresome for me. What ever happened to something being mine to use as I see fit once it's been bought and paid for? So what's next, I get a new refridgerator and wether I like it or not it's 'net enabled via a wireless tech and it reports back what I buy to whomever has elected themselves as the culminator of all marketing knowledge?
I'm no conspiracy kook, but geeze, the invasiveness is getting far too out of hand. Five years ago I never had to screen my calls and in the mean time I've been quite carefull not to give up personal information leading to phone spam. I really don't look forward to snailmail spam offering me CD deals, oil changes, vacation offers, food coupons and other bullshit based on information gathered from my living habits with devices that are installed into and active in the products I buy reguardless of my desicion to share such data. And what if, just some day, some wierd gov't shit does go down that does allow my collected, against my wishes, "data" to be used in judicial matters? How do I know that some disgruntled and underpaid twit who could give a rats ass about me conveys properly their findings or just passes me off as something else so they can get their pay and go home? Rant over.
Explosives and videotape! Perhaps some CA glue, some cardboard fins, add a few weights in the right place for balance and a guide tube, add a nice, big, fat Estes D sized model rocket engine and procede to the launchpad, camcorder in hand. Then, edit the video into a nice little email-able clip and send annonymously to a one Mr. Bobble Head, CEO of company X. Yessss, that should do quite nicely.
No, no, I already see where this is going. The telcos are just saying that they're laying "fibre to the curb" in this manner in order to bring you cheaper, better and faster bandwidth. And indeed, I'm sure they are actually laying the stuff. But once we're all hooked and the honeymoon is over and they start doing to that fibre service just as they and the cable co.s are now doing with DSL and such just what will bcome of all those little robots scuttling about the bowels of are fine land? Well? I can tell you. They will become the one and only thing that the telcos are honestly and earnestly interested in giving we customers. All of those little sewage pipe crawling robots will be converted into customer cornholing machines! Mark my words I tell you!
The gov't is just mad because we got our hands on it first. Now they need to think of something different to use as a backbone for those soon to be ubiquitous televiewers that will be illegal to turn off unless you belong to the inner party. Carefull what you think, you may get to pay a visit to room 101
/. Newspeak for Nerds, Stuff that's most likely BadThink
Awww who needs all that fancy shmancy software, just go hire a cave man!
"This image of a human cranium was created with a new kind of computer-imaging software that uses the ancient technique of stippling to convert complex medical data into 3-D images that can be quickly viewed by medical professionals. Data from CT scans were converted into dots to create the stippled image. Cave dwellers and artisans used stippling thousands of years ago to create figures by painting or carving a series of tiny dots."
Amen! Myself having been ass-out since June and for eight months the year previous to that and having lost nearly everything won't move a finger to help anyone beyond immediate friends and family. That is, for IT work. I give more than fare consulting rates and back my work but the simple fact is money talks, especialy now that my curent full time job pays about half what I used to make. These last two years have been extremely brutal to me and I simply can't afford to be charitable to those with some cash to spare. I am, however, at least considerate of just how much cash they may have to spare and of what they expect in return. Perhaps someday things will improve and I'll be willing to walk that proverbial extra mile again but until then show me the money. A Brotha's gotta eat:-)
Damn, time to start a new urban myth about Walt. if he's not frozen then clearly, he must be stuffed and mounted. Yes, that's it! And,for a short period of time, Walt played part in one of the old Disneyland attractions that was loaded with animatrons. The mission to Mars one I believe it was called. But those wacky Disney workers made him up to look different. Oh, and they transported him to the display daily via the tunels of the massive underground city which lies beneath the park.
Nooooooooo! You poor fewel, it's already too late for you! They weren't trying to slip you a DRM warez "mickey". The damage was in the music you listened too. It was infested with high frequency subliminal badness designed by the unholy union of the RIAA/M$/Liberati/Aliens with anal probing devices and you have now been hipnotized to ignore the presence of the level twelve watcher spiders that are presently infesting your domicile and reporting back to them! You're doomed unless you go to this website immediately! Post haste my friend!
EXACTLY what I wanted to say. At least he did mention about messing up the port length. Myself being an old school autosound installer in my previous life I've designed MANY of these, somewhere on the order of losing count of just how many. Thiele-Smalls, the construction materials, to port or not to port based on the TS params of the driver, enclosure volume you have to work with and the volume of the vehicles cabin drasticaly affect how it will sound. You also have a lot of room to shape he overall sound, everything from those stupid-assed anoying boom-box systems we all so love *cough* down to a nice tight 'n clean system with the sub just fitting in with the rest of the musical range to cover. Sorry, getting kinda off topic here, just had to toss in my own $.02. Anyway, point is, you realy need to know what you're doing before before just tossing any old speaker in any old box. You may get lucky but most likely you'll be vey dissapointed if you do just try and toss it together without proper design.
IMO any company who has unsecured APs on their network needs to get leached from. They deserve it. It's been said before, warchalkers are doing them an indirect favor. You start finding warchalks around your office building and have no intentions of providing an open AP then you have an indication that somethings wrong. Or, you can just pay someone a buncha money (like me!:) to stomp around the place with a notebook and kismet to basically tell you that your network is unsecure. And on another note, I don't think these days are times for tech corps to go around calling anyone theives. But that's just my POV.
What really scares me is people who wear headphones while riding bicycles in traffic.
That's exactly why they stay in my jersey pocket until I get to the trail head and off the road. That is if I even decide to take tunes on that days ride. I'd love to be able to listen to tunes on road rides but that's too sketchy so on the dirt rides only.
I'd like to see Camelbak or one of the other pack makers come up with something like that jacket that could interface with MiniDisk, iPod, and other popular portables. There could be a larger strap on one side or the other to accomodate the controls I guess along with a pocket on the pack and cable routing or into the fabric integration. I'd also like to see a well thought out interface for FSR two way radios that involved the pack, helmet, mike/earphone and PTT keys and to see it be very easy to take on and off as well as use. Myself and friends have gotten great use from the little two ways on dirt rides but only when stopped. I've tried various rigs with VOX and over the ear phones but they become a hinderance really fast. I've seen some specialized helmet mike/earphone combos too but they still reley on VOX and have wires running all over the place.
As for a cell phone I'll take one along if I'm going to be gone for a long time on my own but it stays off and in the bottom of the pack. It's there just in case I get in serious enough trouble to call for help. The trails around town have coverage but it's obviusly worthless up in the mountains so no bother there. Hell, I hate my cell phone so much that I have a hard enough time remembering to take it with me just in general.
I can't wait for iPod support of AC-3 so that I can go about wearing two pairs of headphones and looking like a total jackass. Oh, wait, I don't need my 'pod for that. Nevermind, move along, nothing to see here.
I've got three players to choose from out on the trail, a NetMD MiniDisk, an old Iomega hipzip, and the recently aquired (and very cheaply) 5GB iPod. The MiniDisk holds metric buttloads of tunes, never skips and even on an epic ride two disks are more than enough, not to mention the 45+ hours of battery life on a fresh AA alkaline or a fully charged NiMh AA. It was cheap too, under $100 so if I thrash it I can't be too bummed. It's tiny, light and suprisingly durable for as non-substantial as it feels. It has been droped, and spent many a sweaty, dusty mile in the back pocet of my jersey. However, it's a windoze only issue and an absolute pain in the ass to get MP3's onto. But it's doable. Ripping CDs to it is fairly mindless though.Unfortunately there's no *nix or mac compatability though and all the DRM crap is just uncalled for and really lessens the potential of this otherwise nice little player. The iomega I can't seem to kill, it get's about 10-12 hours out of a charge but the disks are only 40MB. That equates to short 45 min or less rides. It's annoying to cary extra stuff so a pocket full of the lilliputian disks gets old. It does show up as a simple USB drive under OS X, Linux and Windoze though so it's the perfect choice to toss some tunes onto on the way out of the door. It has been badly abused for three years now and it won't die, even in the nasty back pocet of the jersey on a typicaly hot and dusty SoCal trail ride. It's almost impossible to get to skip but the little disks do sometimes get unreadable sectors and you lose an entire song. A simple reformatting takes care of that. The iPod is simply a wet dream of an MP3 player and it never skips. It's seems to be really sturdy. I've taken it on road rides a couple of times but not yet in the dirt. I just can't bring myself to do it. Perhaps I should get some earbuds with a longer cord and stuff it in an otter box and then stuff that into my Camelbak. That would save it from destruction if I were to go OTB and yardsale;-) I think it would do just fine for a jogger. I've yet to get Xtunes up and running so I can't speak for the *nix compatability of it. Works well under Windoze and of course OS X
I've recently went from using mostly Linux and some winbloze to using OS X on an older G3 Powerbook. I had it for about a month. I've since went on to a different job and no longer have that machine. I'm also suffering withdrawls. Anyway, for the most part, I found the single button, non scrolling track pad thing very useful. If I ever found myself in true need of more mousing capability I just simply plugged my MS trackball into the USB and got what I needed. The more I used it the less I needed the external mouse. At first the UI seemed kind of lacking and odd but that went away after about two days. It's not just a mouse thing, it's getting used to the entire UI. apple-click gives you all the right button stuff and fortunately there's not much of it. The UI makes sure that everything is always in the same place for all software. It takes some getting used to but it's a very short and intuitive learning curve and once I found myself forceably without it I found just how much sense it made. Man do I miss that Mac. Guess it's time to lie in wait outside an apple store for the slow, fat and unwary shoppers;-) Oh, and as for scrolling, it's already there, kind of. All windows have an up/down button combo in the lower right corner. As for a web browser the arrow keys work well too. And when you're on an external mouse the scroll wheel and right buttons work as one would expect. Get on OS X man, you won't be disapointed. Don't worry too much about the mouse, it's really not much of an issue.
Well Topsy may have been scheduled to get the chair anyway but Edison had still been up to no good. From the article: Edison had declared that his direct current system was safe, but that Westinghouse's alternating current was a deadly menace. To prove it, Edison had been publically electrocuting dogs and cats for years. He was still a sadistic cunt:-P But can you just imagine the twisted little freak scampering about his lab, jubilating "Cats n dogs! Hell, I'm gonna fry me an elephant! Glee!" I'm guessing he also got his jollies by convincing little children it was okay to stare into the retina burning glare of a DC powered carbon arc lamp:-D
OK, this week sux0r. First I get laid off from the DC full of linux, SomaFM gets neutered, and now this. I hate to say this but FUCK YOU MOBY YOU SKINNY LITTLE PHREAK!!! Go eat some spinach and shut the fuck up! I've been a fan of you for some time. I got my first few moby tracks "illegaly". They sounded sooooo good that I just had to have them in their (nearly) uncompressed full audio glory so hence, to date, I've purchased three Moby CDs. And now because you are acting like a bitch-O-the-RIAA I must forsake you much like I did those suxt0rs Metalica years ago. So I shall now delete all my Moby MP3's, burn/crush/microwave my legally purchased Moby CDs and forevermore reffer to Moby as 'cocksucker corporate bitch' But that's just my opinion.What the hell, he was main-stream anyway and that is always connected to evil;-)
Yup, I agree. Products like that really piss me off. Kewl features and form factor but just enough storage to make it utterly fucking useless. Hell, 128 isn't even enough for music IMO. That is unless you like the swirling hiss of 64K overly compressed tunes. That and changing your playlist more often than our shorts;-)
I've listen to very little commercial radio for the past 3 years but quite a bit of NPR and other public broadcast radio. I've also taken to sending them donations when I can. I listen to Soma quite a bit now too and will be sending them what I can as well. If there's anything your favorite 'net broadcasters need to keep running it's money just as much as hounding our reps. So send it in! Thanks Soma, Indie and Groove salad, good shiznit!
I worked for them back when Verizon wireless was still just AirTouch and was in the Southern California market. I used to install the monitoring equipment in mostly Jeep Wagoneers and Ford Broncos. The Tauri (Taruseses?:-) were just comming into use then. AirTouch also used to give out an enormous amount of free airtime we employees. However, we had to pay full pop for the equipment. No sweet bundle deals like customers. (Average going price of a nice handset + accessories at employee cost? $450). The reason being was it's a form of cheap network monitoring. There was a voicemail box we were to call and report problem areas, time and date of the incident, mobile number, blah blah... Anyway, this is most likely a carry-over from their absorbtion of AirTouch. They've been doing the mobile monitoring for ages. Quite often where to monitor was driven by customer feedback. They also had a plethora of other interesting toys at their disposal, used to assist law enforcement in cloning ring stings (back in the once prevalent analog days) and tracing and tracking of criminals via cell calls. The pay wasn't great but the work was fun and I learned quite a bit. At one point I was volunteering with the (phone) network folks in an effort to work in that department but ended up in their IT dept instead. As a result I got to see the whole of the works from handset to the pieces of fiber interfacing them to the PTSN and Baby Bel. Even got to work on some cell sites and play with some DEC switches (I think they've gone all Lucent since then). I've since moved on and am still in the IT biz now.
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I'm no conspiracy kook, but geeze, the invasiveness is getting far too out of hand. Five years ago I never had to screen my calls and in the mean time I've been quite carefull not to give up personal information leading to phone spam. I really don't look forward to snailmail spam offering me CD deals, oil changes, vacation offers, food coupons and other bullshit based on information gathered from my living habits with devices that are installed into and active in the products I buy reguardless of my desicion to share such data. And what if, just some day, some wierd gov't shit does go down that does allow my collected, against my wishes, "data" to be used in judicial matters? How do I know that some disgruntled and underpaid twit who could give a rats ass about me conveys properly their findings or just passes me off as something else so they can get their pay and go home? Rant over.
Explosives and videotape! Perhaps some CA glue, some cardboard fins, add a few weights in the right place for balance and a guide tube, add a nice, big, fat Estes D sized model rocket engine and procede to the launchpad, camcorder in hand. Then, edit the video into a nice little email-able clip and send annonymously to a one Mr. Bobble Head, CEO of company X. Yessss, that should do quite nicely.
No, no, I already see where this is going. The telcos are just saying that they're laying "fibre to the curb" in this manner in order to bring you cheaper, better and faster bandwidth. And indeed, I'm sure they are actually laying the stuff. But once we're all hooked and the honeymoon is over and they start doing to that fibre service just as they and the cable co.s are now doing with DSL and such just what will bcome of all those little robots scuttling about the bowels of are fine land? Well? I can tell you. They will become the one and only thing that the telcos are honestly and earnestly interested in giving we customers. All of those little sewage pipe crawling robots will be converted into customer cornholing machines! Mark my words I tell you!
w00t! So in that vein of logic it would be illegal to use winbloze! SCHWEETE!
"This image of a human cranium was created with a new kind of computer-imaging software that uses the ancient technique of stippling to convert complex medical data into 3-D images that can be quickly viewed by medical professionals. Data from CT scans were converted into dots to create the stippled image. Cave dwellers and artisans used stippling thousands of years ago to create figures by painting or carving a series of tiny dots."
See what I mean?
Amen! Myself having been ass-out since June and for eight months the year previous to that and having lost nearly everything won't move a finger to help anyone beyond immediate friends and family. That is, for IT work. I give more than fare consulting rates and back my work but the simple fact is money talks, especialy now that my curent full time job pays about half what I used to make. These last two years have been extremely brutal to me and I simply can't afford to be charitable to those with some cash to spare. I am, however, at least considerate of just how much cash they may have to spare and of what they expect in return. Perhaps someday things will improve and I'll be willing to walk that proverbial extra mile again but until then show me the money. A Brotha's gotta eat :-)
Damn, time to start a new urban myth about Walt. if he's not frozen then clearly, he must be stuffed and mounted. Yes, that's it! And,for a short period of time, Walt played part in one of the old Disneyland attractions that was loaded with animatrons. The mission to Mars one I believe it was called. But those wacky Disney workers made him up to look different. Oh, and they transported him to the display daily via the tunels of the massive underground city which lies beneath the park.
Yer gettin' a Commodore! Brah!
Nooooooooo! You poor fewel, it's already too late for you! They weren't trying to slip you a DRM warez "mickey". The damage was in the music you listened too. It was infested with high frequency subliminal badness designed by the unholy union of the RIAA/M$/Liberati/Aliens with anal probing devices and you have now been hipnotized to ignore the presence of the level twelve watcher spiders that are presently infesting your domicile and reporting back to them! You're doomed unless you go to this website immediately! Post haste my friend!
EXACTLY what I wanted to say. At least he did mention about messing up the port length. Myself being an old school autosound installer in my previous life I've designed MANY of these, somewhere on the order of losing count of just how many. Thiele-Smalls, the construction materials, to port or not to port based on the TS params of the driver, enclosure volume you have to work with and the volume of the vehicles cabin drasticaly affect how it will sound. You also have a lot of room to shape he overall sound, everything from those stupid-assed anoying boom-box systems we all so love *cough* down to a nice tight 'n clean system with the sub just fitting in with the rest of the musical range to cover. Sorry, getting kinda off topic here, just had to toss in my own $.02. Anyway, point is, you realy need to know what you're doing before before just tossing any old speaker in any old box. You may get lucky but most likely you'll be vey dissapointed if you do just try and toss it together without proper design.
IMO any company who has unsecured APs on their network needs to get leached from. They deserve it. It's been said before, warchalkers are doing them an indirect favor. You start finding warchalks around your office building and have no intentions of providing an open AP then you have an indication that somethings wrong. Or, you can just pay someone a buncha money (like me!:) to stomp around the place with a notebook and kismet to basically tell you that your network is unsecure. And on another note, I don't think these days are times for tech corps to go around calling anyone theives. But that's just my POV.
That's exactly why they stay in my jersey pocket until I get to the trail head and off the road. That is if I even decide to take tunes on that days ride. I'd love to be able to listen to tunes on road rides but that's too sketchy so on the dirt rides only.
I'd like to see Camelbak or one of the other pack makers come up with something like that jacket that could interface with MiniDisk, iPod, and other popular portables. There could be a larger strap on one side or the other to accomodate the controls I guess along with a pocket on the pack and cable routing or into the fabric integration. I'd also like to see a well thought out interface for FSR two way radios that involved the pack, helmet, mike/earphone and PTT keys and to see it be very easy to take on and off as well as use. Myself and friends have gotten great use from the little two ways on dirt rides but only when stopped. I've tried various rigs with VOX and over the ear phones but they become a hinderance really fast. I've seen some specialized helmet mike/earphone combos too but they still reley on VOX and have wires running all over the place.
As for a cell phone I'll take one along if I'm going to be gone for a long time on my own but it stays off and in the bottom of the pack. It's there just in case I get in serious enough trouble to call for help. The trails around town have coverage but it's obviusly worthless up in the mountains so no bother there. Hell, I hate my cell phone so much that I have a hard enough time remembering to take it with me just in general.BWaaaahahaaa! THX dude, that made my otherwise rotten fucking day.
I can't wait for iPod support of AC-3 so that I can go about wearing two pairs of headphones and looking like a total jackass. Oh, wait, I don't need my 'pod for that. Nevermind, move along, nothing to see here.
Happy trails!
- C
I've recently went from using mostly Linux and some winbloze to using OS X on an older G3 Powerbook. I had it for about a month. I've since went on to a different job and no longer have that machine. I'm also suffering withdrawls. Anyway, for the most part, I found the single button, non scrolling track pad thing very useful. If I ever found myself in true need of more mousing capability I just simply plugged my MS trackball into the USB and got what I needed. The more I used it the less I needed the external mouse. At first the UI seemed kind of lacking and odd but that went away after about two days. It's not just a mouse thing, it's getting used to the entire UI. apple-click gives you all the right button stuff and fortunately there's not much of it. The UI makes sure that everything is always in the same place for all software. It takes some getting used to but it's a very short and intuitive learning curve and once I found myself forceably without it I found just how much sense it made. Man do I miss that Mac. Guess it's time to lie in wait outside an apple store for the slow, fat and unwary shoppers ;-) Oh, and as for scrolling, it's already there, kind of. All windows have an up/down button combo in the lower right corner. As for a web browser the arrow keys work well too. And when you're on an external mouse the scroll wheel and right buttons work as one would expect. Get on OS X man, you won't be disapointed. Don't worry too much about the mouse, it's really not much of an issue.
Well Topsy may have been scheduled to get the chair anyway but Edison had still been up to no good. From the article: Edison had declared that his direct current system was safe, but that Westinghouse's alternating current was a deadly menace. To prove it, Edison had been publically electrocuting dogs and cats for years. He was still a sadistic cunt :-P But can you just imagine the twisted little freak scampering about his lab, jubilating "Cats n dogs! Hell, I'm gonna fry me an elephant! Glee!" I'm guessing he also got his jollies by convincing little children it was okay to stare into the retina burning glare of a DC powered carbon arc lamp :-D
A Beowolfe cluster of these little guys can bring me a case of Guinness?
Billy-Borg is gonna buy out the RIAA thereby increasing his legions of Billy-Bitches tenfold. How diabolical of him.
Solong Moby,
- C
Yup, I agree. Products like that really piss me off. Kewl features and form factor but just enough storage to make it utterly fucking useless. Hell, 128 isn't even enough for music IMO. That is unless you like the swirling hiss of 64K overly compressed tunes. That and changing your playlist more often than our shorts ;-)
Exactaly! Hey, but at least it might mean that the kids over at PA can muse about giving Div a new friend to abuse/play with, besides the cat )=^)
I've listen to very little commercial radio for the past 3 years but quite a bit of NPR and other public broadcast radio. I've also taken to sending them donations when I can. I listen to Soma quite a bit now too and will be sending them what I can as well. If there's anything your favorite 'net broadcasters need to keep running it's money just as much as hounding our reps. So send it in! Thanks Soma, Indie and Groove salad, good shiznit!
I worked for them back when Verizon wireless was still just AirTouch and was in the Southern California market. I used to install the monitoring equipment in mostly Jeep Wagoneers and Ford Broncos. The Tauri (Taruseses? :-) were just comming into use then. AirTouch also used to give out an enormous amount of free airtime we employees. However, we had to pay full pop for the equipment. No sweet bundle deals like customers. (Average going price of a nice handset + accessories at employee cost? $450). The reason being was it's a form of cheap network monitoring. There was a voicemail box we were to call and report problem areas, time and date of the incident, mobile number, blah blah... Anyway, this is most likely a carry-over from their absorbtion of AirTouch. They've been doing the mobile monitoring for ages. Quite often where to monitor was driven by customer feedback. They also had a plethora of other interesting toys at their disposal, used to assist law enforcement in cloning ring stings (back in the once prevalent analog days) and tracing and tracking of criminals via cell calls. The pay wasn't great but the work was fun and I learned quite a bit. At one point I was volunteering with the (phone) network folks in an effort to work in that department but ended up in their IT dept instead. As a result I got to see the whole of the works from handset to the pieces of fiber interfacing them to the PTSN and Baby Bel. Even got to work on some cell sites and play with some DEC switches (I think they've gone all Lucent since then). I've since moved on and am still in the IT biz now.