It's also apparent that the US Congress doesn't understand the effect that its
foolishness has on the rest of the world. At the moment, most of the other major
economies (i.e., Pacific Rim, Europe, etc.) have NOT shifted their timekeeping
You mean they used to be always on exactly the same day? NOT! I specifically remember that back in the '80s, UK DST and US DST were on different weeks. I was on a week-long trip to London, and the Sunday of my return was the switchover date in one, but not the other.
That being said, this was an epic fail move by Congress (aka "the opposite of Progress") because moving the actual date has very little effect on "energy savings". The only real point of DST is to equalize the time of sunrise, more or less. Whether it is dark when you wake up has more to do with which part of the time zone you live in. I lived for a year in Louisana (eastern CST) after being in central CST and I was surprised what an ungodly early time the sun rose, even though it was just half an hour early. I've been back in central CST ever since. The opposite should apply to anyone in the western half of a time zone, such as Indiana, so I'm not surprised that they stayed off DST for so long.
Meh. I have mine double-escaped, using two unescape() calls. The first hides the e-mail address, and the second hides the HTML for the mailto link. It even has a <noscript> condition to point out that the user does not have Javascript enabled. I've been scrupulous about noscript ever since one web site that just displayed a blank black page with JS disabled.
If I was really paranoid, I'd probably come up with some sort of while loop to decode the mail address, and a skip-over condition to change the index inside the loop, to put fear into anyone trying to write a halting-problem detector/avoider.
But I'm not stupid enough to link to my page, even though the spammers have the address anyhow. It was a reaction to the time that some evil spider found my resume on my web site and immediately shot off resume-related spam (maybe one of those work at home scams, I don't remember). Just because "the spammers" already have your address doesn't mean that others aren't trying.
According to what I see there, you can't say "Twenty-ten 10th" (no matter how stupid it sounds), but you can say "Winter events". List 2 requires something from list 1 to be a problem.
And "Whistler?" What's that, the name of the mascot or something? I guess they can't have the 10th exhibition of Whistler's paintings this winter.
Correction: that's one of the first things any good distro never turns on.
Linux and BSD had it for a long time before Solaris had it in the standard install. And you can't even enable telnetd on OS X since about 10.2 or so, unless you know how to edit the right config files in/etc.
but I've never dealt with it as the few OS X boxes we do have are nothing short of crap although two replacement hdds later it does seem to be more stable now.
Ouch. I've been dealing with problems with a dying boot drive in my dual 1GHz G4 for the past two months or so. When the boot drive spins down from the computer being idle, and then later refuses to spin up, OS X will lock up once you start using it again. The fun part is that I mostly SSH and VNC into it, and it would work until I hit a unix command that wasn't in the disk cache.
Once the 5+ year old boot drive was replaced with a new SATA card and drive, another drive showed early signs of failure. So I got a new SATA drive and put it on the second port, which wouldn't spin up after spindown (it just gave I/O errors). Then I put a PATA drive on the SATA card, which would cause the system to lock up for multiple minutes after trying to spin up the boot drive. I assume these problems were due to the SATA card I hung the new boot drive off of, because I put the new PATA drive on an internal IDE bus and all is happy again. (I didn't do it that way at first because the drives needed to be switched around.)
I sure hope that Leopard gets kernel lock granularity fixes on par with Linux 2.6, because right now the I/O subsystem can lock the OS up so hard.
I was going to just not care, then I noticed the link to Version tracker. Yep, it's an OS X program, so now I do care, and I'll make sure to spread the bad word about it when I have a chance. Stuff like this is an accident waiting to happen. What if someone were to mis-key a code in such a way that it triggered the "protection"? What if some bug caused it to activate anyhow?
Two wrongs don't make a right. Especially if the second wrong is a bigger wrong.
If you're going to be pedantic about the Genesis, then the 2600 had six Atari-branded hardware versions:
6-switch
4-switch (with woodgrain and black case color variations)
5200 adapter (plays 2600 games on a 2-port 5200 and on the last revision of the 4-port 5200)
2600 Jr.
Atari 7800 (included the 2600 chipset for backwards compatibility)
Flashback 2 (2600 on an ASIC)
...and maybe a couple more if you don't count Atari-branded gear (I think Jakks came out with a joystick and a paddle unit with a real 2600-on-a-chip and not a famiclone chip)
While his actions are most likely altruistic, he should be punished for his deeds and then be enlisted by some the Canadian police and do it legally.
So the Canadian police (presumably RCMP) should be spying on American citizens? I don't know, maybe they should keep to Canada and leave the Americans for the FBI?
That fails to consider one thing: even though 64 bits are required to go past 4 gigabytes, virtual memory means that a 32-bit OS can still use more than 4GB of memory. As long as each individual process is happy with less than 4 gigabytes, the OS can simply assign multiple <4GB chunks out of >4GB of real memory for multiple programs. The only requirement is to break away from the 32-bit PCI bus in favor of 64-bit PCI.
However, I suppose you can say that a "64-bit OS" doesn't necessarily imply a 64-bit CPU, in which case OS X 10.4 would qualify as such, even though the kernel used 32-bit code. (it supported >4GB of real memory and allowed >4GB of virtual memory for a 64-bit process) So technically, the "64-bit operating system" has already been here for almost two years in OS X, and longer in Linux. There are professional users who hit the 4GB process barrier years ago, but it will still a few years before >4GB process space is a requirement for consumer or even business users.
The reason that the 386 was such an essential requirement for Windows 95 is that process space before then was allocated in 64K-maximum chunks, if it weren't for the essential loophole of real-mode segment arithmetic. The 32-to-64 bit transition is not nearly such a hard limit.
I've got XGB of RAM [where X>1] and Vista's using up 75% of it running the OS alone; therefore Vista must need XGB of RAM to even run, never mind applications!
Oh man. At my last job we had a product which was Linux-based, and one of the easily accessible commands showed how much "free memory" there was. Except that this showed free non-cache memory as "free memory", so we constantly had customers telling us their system was running out of memory. I think we did also show cache memory, but that's not obvious enough for the non-savvy users. (The "official" way to identify low-memory problems was to open a shell and run top.)
The funny part of this is there's probably going to be people from at least a dozen companies trying to figure out who I am and when I worked for them.
When I was a kid we had Wizardry II (Apple ][) and IIRC you could select Dungeons and Dragons style races like dwarf, mage, etc. Ultima and the rest of the genre too.
Yeah, but them was cracka dwarfs and mages and elves.
That's why OS X uses a double float for storing dates and times. When we get to the year 292 billion, OS X will still work, but the time will then only have a two second accuracy.
(Actually, it should stop ticking the clock at all without a patch, since you can't add one second any more. Or you could just add the seconds since startup to the time at startup.)
Why is the close button for windows next to the minimize and maximize buttons? I can't tell you the number of times I clicked on the wrong button and said 'damnit'
Because someone is trying too hard to be bug-compatible with Windows? While it's probably not as bad in XP and later (because they increased the size of the buttons), it doesn't help me because the few times I install Windows (mostly in VMs), it's W2K thanks to its lack of Big Brother DRM. I can't tell you how many times I've hit the maximize button when trying to close a window. All they needed to do was separate them by a few pixels of DMZ (de-mouseized zone) and there wouldn't be a problem.
I mean, if you're going to copy a UI, could you at least try not to copy the stupid bits?
It isn't the grind. Sure, the grinding wastes time to turn five hours of content (much of which these days is cut-scenes) into 50 hours of game. My pet peeve is the forced grind caused by random encounters that come out of nowhere. Walk 30 seconds, fight five minutes, repeat. That gets really annoying when you're just wandering around trying to figure out where the hell you are.
Now I admit that back in the old days ('80s) it was simply easier to write the code to work that way. Having random monsters show on the map might not even be feasible depending on the sprite limitations of the video hardware.
But that was two decades ago, and you'd think that by now that the "walk 30 seconds, fight five minutes, repeat" paradigm would be as dead as a hobgoblin killed by a 60th level GrindMaster.
And even some of the new metaphors aren't all that great. A friend of mine figured how to set up FFXII to quite literally play itself. He rigged up the auto-combat so that a particular battle would esentially last forever (with a monster that kept spawning minions), started the battle, then walked away. When he got back, he just had to interrupt the auto-combat and kill the main monster manually.
I walked into a Target store this morning looking for a Wii and found four PS3s instead. I'd rather have a Wii than try to squeeze $4800 out of some wanker at Sony.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean they used to be always on exactly the same day? NOT! I specifically remember that back in the '80s, UK DST and US DST were on different weeks. I was on a week-long trip to London, and the Sunday of my return was the switchover date in one, but not the other.
That being said, this was an epic fail move by Congress (aka "the opposite of Progress") because moving the actual date has very little effect on "energy savings". The only real point of DST is to equalize the time of sunrise, more or less. Whether it is dark when you wake up has more to do with which part of the time zone you live in. I lived for a year in Louisana (eastern CST) after being in central CST and I was surprised what an ungodly early time the sun rose, even though it was just half an hour early. I've been back in central CST ever since. The opposite should apply to anyone in the western half of a time zone, such as Indiana, so I'm not surprised that they stayed off DST for so long.
Fortunately, WWV includes a DST flag so that at least those so-called "atomic clocks" (actually radio clocks) automatically changed at the right time.
Meh. I have mine double-escaped, using two unescape() calls. The first hides the e-mail address, and the second hides the HTML for the mailto link. It even has a <noscript> condition to point out that the user does not have Javascript enabled. I've been scrupulous about noscript ever since one web site that just displayed a blank black page with JS disabled.
If I was really paranoid, I'd probably come up with some sort of while loop to decode the mail address, and a skip-over condition to change the index inside the loop, to put fear into anyone trying to write a halting-problem detector/avoider.
But I'm not stupid enough to link to my page, even though the spammers have the address anyhow. It was a reaction to the time that some evil spider found my resume on my web site and immediately shot off resume-related spam (maybe one of those work at home scams, I don't remember). Just because "the spammers" already have your address doesn't mean that others aren't trying.
"PNG images are almost completely superior to GIFs except for the fact they do not support animations, therefore making them, for all intents and purposes of ruining browsers, useless."
Maybe BloodNinja bought it...
"Aight, I put on my robe and wizard hat. AND KENOBI'S ROBE!"
Actually, GPL open source does have one restriction to distribution: you must make the source code available, including any changes you made.
According to what I see there, you can't say "Twenty-ten 10th" (no matter how stupid it sounds), but you can say "Winter events". List 2 requires something from list 1 to be a problem.
And "Whistler?" What's that, the name of the mascot or something? I guess they can't have the 10th exhibition of Whistler's paintings this winter.
Correction: that's one of the first things any good distro never turns on.
Linux and BSD had it for a long time before Solaris had it in the standard install. And you can't even enable telnetd on OS X since about 10.2 or so, unless you know how to edit the right config files in /etc.
Ouch. I've been dealing with problems with a dying boot drive in my dual 1GHz G4 for the past two months or so. When the boot drive spins down from the computer being idle, and then later refuses to spin up, OS X will lock up once you start using it again. The fun part is that I mostly SSH and VNC into it, and it would work until I hit a unix command that wasn't in the disk cache.
Once the 5+ year old boot drive was replaced with a new SATA card and drive, another drive showed early signs of failure. So I got a new SATA drive and put it on the second port, which wouldn't spin up after spindown (it just gave I/O errors). Then I put a PATA drive on the SATA card, which would cause the system to lock up for multiple minutes after trying to spin up the boot drive. I assume these problems were due to the SATA card I hung the new boot drive off of, because I put the new PATA drive on an internal IDE bus and all is happy again. (I didn't do it that way at first because the drives needed to be switched around.)
I sure hope that Leopard gets kernel lock granularity fixes on par with Linux 2.6, because right now the I/O subsystem can lock the OS up so hard.
I was going to just not care, then I noticed the link to Version tracker. Yep, it's an OS X program, so now I do care, and I'll make sure to spread the bad word about it when I have a chance. Stuff like this is an accident waiting to happen. What if someone were to mis-key a code in such a way that it triggered the "protection"? What if some bug caused it to activate anyhow?
Two wrongs don't make a right. Especially if the second wrong is a bigger wrong.
If you're going to be pedantic about the Genesis, then the 2600 had six Atari-branded hardware versions:
6-switch
4-switch (with woodgrain and black case color variations)
5200 adapter (plays 2600 games on a 2-port 5200 and on the last revision of the 4-port 5200)
2600 Jr.
Atari 7800 (included the 2600 chipset for backwards compatibility)
Flashback 2 (2600 on an ASIC)
...and maybe a couple more if you don't count Atari-branded gear (I think Jakks came out with a joystick and a paddle unit with a real 2600-on-a-chip and not a famiclone chip)
So the Canadian police (presumably RCMP) should be spying on American citizens? I don't know, maybe they should keep to Canada and leave the Americans for the FBI?
That fails to consider one thing: even though 64 bits are required to go past 4 gigabytes, virtual memory means that a 32-bit OS can still use more than 4GB of memory. As long as each individual process is happy with less than 4 gigabytes, the OS can simply assign multiple <4GB chunks out of >4GB of real memory for multiple programs. The only requirement is to break away from the 32-bit PCI bus in favor of 64-bit PCI.
However, I suppose you can say that a "64-bit OS" doesn't necessarily imply a 64-bit CPU, in which case OS X 10.4 would qualify as such, even though the kernel used 32-bit code. (it supported >4GB of real memory and allowed >4GB of virtual memory for a 64-bit process) So technically, the "64-bit operating system" has already been here for almost two years in OS X, and longer in Linux. There are professional users who hit the 4GB process barrier years ago, but it will still a few years before >4GB process space is a requirement for consumer or even business users.
The reason that the 386 was such an essential requirement for Windows 95 is that process space before then was allocated in 64K-maximum chunks, if it weren't for the essential loophole of real-mode segment arithmetic. The 32-to-64 bit transition is not nearly such a hard limit.
Hey, at least get the joke right: it's "confirm or deny"!
Oh man. At my last job we had a product which was Linux-based, and one of the easily accessible commands showed how much "free memory" there was. Except that this showed free non-cache memory as "free memory", so we constantly had customers telling us their system was running out of memory. I think we did also show cache memory, but that's not obvious enough for the non-savvy users. (The "official" way to identify low-memory problems was to open a shell and run top.)
The funny part of this is there's probably going to be people from at least a dozen companies trying to figure out who I am and when I worked for them.
Yeah, but them was cracka dwarfs and mages and elves.
I think he's Will Riker, and I claim a latex forehead prosthetic as my prize for playing Spot The Reference.
That's why OS X uses a double float for storing dates and times. When we get to the year 292 billion, OS X will still work, but the time will then only have a two second accuracy.
(Actually, it should stop ticking the clock at all without a patch, since you can't add one second any more. Or you could just add the seconds since startup to the time at startup.)
Because someone is trying too hard to be bug-compatible with Windows? While it's probably not as bad in XP and later (because they increased the size of the buttons), it doesn't help me because the few times I install Windows (mostly in VMs), it's W2K thanks to its lack of Big Brother DRM. I can't tell you how many times I've hit the maximize button when trying to close a window. All they needed to do was separate them by a few pixels of DMZ (de-mouseized zone) and there wouldn't be a problem.
I mean, if you're going to copy a UI, could you at least try not to copy the stupid bits?
It isn't the grind. Sure, the grinding wastes time to turn five hours of content (much of which these days is cut-scenes) into 50 hours of game. My pet peeve is the forced grind caused by random encounters that come out of nowhere. Walk 30 seconds, fight five minutes, repeat. That gets really annoying when you're just wandering around trying to figure out where the hell you are.
Now I admit that back in the old days ('80s) it was simply easier to write the code to work that way. Having random monsters show on the map might not even be feasible depending on the sprite limitations of the video hardware.
But that was two decades ago, and you'd think that by now that the "walk 30 seconds, fight five minutes, repeat" paradigm would be as dead as a hobgoblin killed by a 60th level GrindMaster.
And even some of the new metaphors aren't all that great. A friend of mine figured how to set up FFXII to quite literally play itself. He rigged up the auto-combat so that a particular battle would esentially last forever (with a monster that kept spawning minions), started the battle, then walked away. When he got back, he just had to interrupt the auto-combat and kill the main monster manually.
I walked into a Target store this morning looking for a Wii and found four PS3s instead. I'd rather have a Wii than try to squeeze $4800 out of some wanker at Sony.
Two words: Vomit Comet.
(Yes, I know there has already been a Vomit Comet porn filmed already. That shouldn't stop it from being done again.)
You forgot the onion on the belt, and that's the most important part, because it was the style at the time!
And get off my lawn, you damn kids!
I've been using joker.com since I first got a domain back in 2000. It's been fine for me.
But I should mention that I've always done my own DNS, and people seem to be having problems with using them for DNS and other services.