...we played a joke on a sales guy
by installing Bob on his laptop.
We bought it off eBay. I bet you can
still find it. Our sales guy turned out
to be smart enough to go "what is this shit???"
and he de-installed. I wonder how many would
take a shine to it if you "made the switch" on them.
Oh, and as others have pointed out Bob wasn't
really an OS; but then neither was Windows when
it first came out... it was just a GUI shell
for DOS. True story: When I was in tech support
we had a user who said "Word Perfect" when she was
asked what her OS was. A new tech who was full of himself
might have written her off as an idiot; but somebody
had informed me that Word Perfect had written its own
GUI shell that ran on top of DOS at some point.
From the user standpoint, anything that you interract
with and can use to launch apps is easily termed an OS.
The layer below that which handles hardware is transparent
to them. Since Windows 3.x was being called an OS, the
woman was well within her rights to call the WP shell
an OS, IMHO. IIRC, you could go run/start/progman in Windows95
and get the old Win3.x shell. This was sometimes done
in support for techs using scripts that were based on
the old UI! Ahhh.... memories.
It seems to be back with a vengeance. Of course, I knew
better than to click on it. I was really concerned that they
already had my computer; but apparently they didn't.
You can't "view source" on their code, because it changes
windows too fast. Ethereal, and its "follow stream" feature
solve that problem. I was able to examine the code. I didn't
really delve into it; but it looks like they've found some weaknesses
in the scripts that allow you to somehow fake out the pop-up
blocker.
Viewing the source allowed me to see the site they pull the
JS from, and I simply redirect it to localhost now. That's a short-term
fix of course. They really need to close the loophole that this code
exploits.
Wait for a holographic display. Yeah, we're nowhere near being
able to achieve it now. You'd need (horiz)(height) the bandwidth
although compression should help a lot. You'd need a way to have a microscopic
projector in each pixel, projecting a complete image.
Upside: No glasses. Your TV would literally look like a window
into another world.
Downside: Scads of energy to throw enough light from each microprojector,
horrendous bandwidth requirement.
Maybe the horrendous bandwidth requirement isn't a downside--it's the problem
looking for the solutions that involve shoving 20 Libraries of Congress through
a fiber every second.
Anyway, give me a call when these holographic window displays are available.
They started as the counter-culture, making "blue box"
calls and screwing AT&T. Now they're the establishment;
but they remember what it was like being on the other side.
There's nothing quite so oppressive as a former revolutionary.
The real excitement now is in making "blue box" calls charged
to AT&T and Apple. The more things change, the
more they stay the same.
This isn't quite as bad as them burning things,
which are just going to be rebuilt anyway; but it's still
going to use quite a bit of energy when the tower is repaired.
I'm not a "true believer" in the A part of AGW. I'm
just using "spews carbon" here as a shorthand for things
that are bad for the environment. Something tells me ELF
doesn't run out and purchase offsets everytime they "do an action".
So. For the good of the planet, ELF must be stopped!
How are you going to deal with rotation?
You have exactly two places on the rock where
the thrust may be applied in one direction.
Those may not be the optimal places to apply
thrust, or the easiest places to obtain solar
power. If it rotates like a planet, the stable
spot would be like our poles and would experience
long periods of darkness, so solar power is out.
If the probe is not on a pole, then you have to
vector thrust which is complicated on a spinning
rock, and you can only thrust when it's possible
to vector in an appropriate direction.
Gravity tugs are an elegant solution because
it doesn't matter as much how the thing rotates.
(although it probably has some impact for an irregularly
shaped asteroid).
But, but... if we made it out to be no big deal, how would Slashdot
generate all those page-views from posts complaining about their lack
of ability to register leftbankcafe.se?
I usually stay quiet about the sig; but I'll break
the silence and state for the record that it is indeed
grammar-nazi bait. On any given thread with decent exposure,
the sig generates discussion. Sometimes it generates more
discussion than my actual content.
A surprising number of would-be "nazis" will point
out the "intents and purposes" soundalike problem, but
not the vulgar use of "begs the question".
I'm not so obsessed as to keep a victim list; but I
believe it would be well into the double-digits at this
point. Somebody has even coined a "law" for the fact that
if you point out a grammar mistake to somebody, the odds
that your post will also contain a mistake are quite high.
I used to rotate my sigs; but
Slashdot dynamicly generates sigs, even in archived material.
At least partly because of that, I've decided to leave it
for now. Taking it out and replacing it with anything would
lead to some really bizarre nonsequiturs in the "archives".
It would be nice if Slashdot didn't dynamicly regenerate sigs
in archvies; but there probably isn't any way to fix that
since I doubt Slashdot retains a sig history, and once a bit
of JavaScript or whatever is archived (as opposed to the sig itself)
the sig is lost.
I'll see what I can do to work in an abuse of their/they're/there or it's/its.:)
When I was in tech support 10 years ago,
"How do I get rid of things in the drop-down?" was a common
Netscape support question.
Some of them were very cool and didn't say why
they wanted to get rid of it. Some said "I accidently
hit this link". I think I may have had one or two guys
who were honest about it during my entire time there.
...until somebody mentioned the Wing Commander hack.
I used to work at an ISP and helped with the custom browser
installers burned onto CD-ROMs. During testing we discovered
that NT 4 would behave badly if you started using it too soon
after the install had completed. No time to figure that one
out. It had to ship.
Solution? Throw up a fake progress dialog that said "configuring settings"
that ran for about 30 seconds after everything else was done.
We were banking on the user not fiddling with his machine while
it was still doing the all-important configuring.
1: Whan that aprill with his shoures soote 2: The droghte of march hath perced to the roote, 3: And bathed every veyne in swich licour 4: Of which vertu engendred is the flour; 5: Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth 6: Inspired hath in every holt and heeth 7: Tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne 8: Hath in the ram his halve cours yronne, 9: And smale foweles maken melodye, 10: That slepen al the nyght with open ye 11: (so priketh hem nature in hir corages); 12: Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
I think you're taking it a bit too literally.
Analogies tend to break down when... they are no longer
taken as analogies!
I'm not advocating the direct opposite of Free Trade,
which I guess would be sealed borders between all states.
Somewhere between that, and zero tarrifs there is a fair
tarrif that compensates for the costs of trade.
We've already seen what Globalization does when "the" economy
has issues. A housing crisis in the USA doesn't cause issues in
China without globalization.
The Free Trade advocates always sold the advantages, which were
readily calculable; but ignored the disadvantages which are harder
to measure until you actually experience them.
Only now are people beginning to realize something that should have
been apparent right from the start: one single, massive economic system
is inherently bad. It's like a monopoly. There's no backup.
It's even worse if you take this philosophy and duplicate it outside
the financial realm. We already see this with the "war on drugs". Many
countries that would like to legalize may not do so, not because of internal
resistance; but because they've signed a UN convention.
Now take that, and apply it to ALL the laws. Yuck.
Most people don't like war, but if the alternative is a "one size fits all"
solution, there will be times when it doesn't fit, and war becomes the only
alternative. They just won't be wars between nation-states anymore. They'll
all be civil wars, which are oftentimes far worse.
Also, what about refugees? Tell me, where do the boat people go when
everywhere is Cuba?
It shouldn't be more controversial
than the reactors that powered Voyager and other deep
space probes. There have been protests over some of
the more potentially dangerous reactors that might
have caused contamination over a wide area if they blew
up; but IIRC they launched anyway.
A reactor that small shouldn't require a huge ammount
of fissile material. I bet it could blow up in the atmosphere
and produce less radiation than we get from a day of coal
fired power in the Eastern US. Coal is full of trace radioactive
elements, and it adds up when you burn as much as we do.
Burning Man corp is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Halliburton / Umbrella Corporation
Does that mean you no longer have to worry about losing
your security clearance if you attend? I was never cleared,
but I used to be around a lot of people who either were, or
were planning to be. There was initially this idea of "attend
BM, certain denial", but later on it became "they will just ask
you a lot more questions".
Maybe, just maybe, it's one of those
PDF dealies where it's not really blacked out
because they're just rendering rectangles over
text that's still in the document. Yeah, it's a
longshot but check on it anyway.
Also, WTF could possibly be so sensitive about
a contract for a WEB SITE??? You'd think they have
some kind of sense for how much traffic the most popular
government sites are getting, and be able to order some
colo and stuff based on that. That's what I'd expect to
find in there... servers, bandwidth, hourly support rates
to handle wierd stuff like DDoS attacks. WTF could possibly
be in there that needs to be blacked out for any reason???
[ ] Inherently over the shark right from the start--every counterculture is doomed to devolve into authoritarianism.
[ ] left Bay Area
[X] charging admission
[ ] mentioned on Malcolm in the Middle
[ ] guy burned the man prematurely and got in legal trouble for it
Slashdot Mirror
...we played a joke on a sales guy by installing Bob on his laptop. We bought it off eBay. I bet you can still find it. Our sales guy turned out to be smart enough to go "what is this shit???" and he de-installed. I wonder how many would take a shine to it if you "made the switch" on them.
Oh, and as others have pointed out Bob wasn't really an OS; but then neither was Windows when it first came out... it was just a GUI shell for DOS. True story: When I was in tech support we had a user who said "Word Perfect" when she was asked what her OS was. A new tech who was full of himself might have written her off as an idiot; but somebody had informed me that Word Perfect had written its own GUI shell that ran on top of DOS at some point. From the user standpoint, anything that you interract with and can use to launch apps is easily termed an OS. The layer below that which handles hardware is transparent to them. Since Windows 3.x was being called an OS, the woman was well within her rights to call the WP shell an OS, IMHO. IIRC, you could go run/start/progman in Windows95 and get the old Win3.x shell. This was sometimes done in support for techs using scripts that were based on the old UI! Ahhh.... memories.
It seems to be back with a vengeance. Of course, I knew better than to click on it. I was really concerned that they already had my computer; but apparently they didn't.
You can't "view source" on their code, because it changes windows too fast. Ethereal, and its "follow stream" feature solve that problem. I was able to examine the code. I didn't really delve into it; but it looks like they've found some weaknesses in the scripts that allow you to somehow fake out the pop-up blocker.
Viewing the source allowed me to see the site they pull the JS from, and I simply redirect it to localhost now. That's a short-term fix of course. They really need to close the loophole that this code exploits.
Wait for a holographic display. Yeah, we're nowhere near being able to achieve it now. You'd need (horiz)(height) the bandwidth although compression should help a lot. You'd need a way to have a microscopic projector in each pixel, projecting a complete image.
Upside: No glasses. Your TV would literally look like a window into another world.
Downside: Scads of energy to throw enough light from each microprojector, horrendous bandwidth requirement.
Maybe the horrendous bandwidth requirement isn't a downside--it's the problem looking for the solutions that involve shoving 20 Libraries of Congress through a fiber every second.
Anyway, give me a call when these holographic window displays are available.
They started as the counter-culture, making "blue box" calls and screwing AT&T. Now they're the establishment; but they remember what it was like being on the other side. There's nothing quite so oppressive as a former revolutionary. The real excitement now is in making "blue box" calls charged to AT&T and Apple. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
...quit naming stuff "Waldo". You won't have this problem.
This isn't quite as bad as them burning things, which are just going to be rebuilt anyway; but it's still going to use quite a bit of energy when the tower is repaired.
I'm not a "true believer" in the A part of AGW. I'm just using "spews carbon" here as a shorthand for things that are bad for the environment. Something tells me ELF doesn't run out and purchase offsets everytime they "do an action".
So. For the good of the planet, ELF must be stopped!
How are you going to deal with rotation? You have exactly two places on the rock where the thrust may be applied in one direction. Those may not be the optimal places to apply thrust, or the easiest places to obtain solar power. If it rotates like a planet, the stable spot would be like our poles and would experience long periods of darkness, so solar power is out. If the probe is not on a pole, then you have to vector thrust which is complicated on a spinning rock, and you can only thrust when it's possible to vector in an appropriate direction.
Gravity tugs are an elegant solution because it doesn't matter as much how the thing rotates. (although it probably has some impact for an irregularly shaped asteroid).
But, but... if we made it out to be no big deal, how would Slashdot generate all those page-views from posts complaining about their lack of ability to register leftbankcafe.se?
I gotta jump into the old horseless carriage for a spot of motoring.
"Fill it up with petroleum distilates, post haste!"
We also would have accepted: "My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the ways I likes it."
These $100k phone jobs aren't, "How do I plug in the VCR?" support.
As somebody else pointed out, It's collections and sales. That's a totally different beast from what most geeks think of as call-center.
These 6-figure people collect or sell 7-figures. They are not informing you that the router is down, or giving you the IP address for the mail server.
I usually stay quiet about the sig; but I'll break the silence and state for the record that it is indeed grammar-nazi bait. On any given thread with decent exposure, the sig generates discussion. Sometimes it generates more discussion than my actual content.
A surprising number of would-be "nazis" will point out the "intents and purposes" soundalike problem, but not the vulgar use of "begs the question".
I'm not so obsessed as to keep a victim list; but I believe it would be well into the double-digits at this point. Somebody has even coined a "law" for the fact that if you point out a grammar mistake to somebody, the odds that your post will also contain a mistake are quite high.
I used to rotate my sigs; but Slashdot dynamicly generates sigs, even in archived material. At least partly because of that, I've decided to leave it for now. Taking it out and replacing it with anything would lead to some really bizarre nonsequiturs in the "archives". It would be nice if Slashdot didn't dynamicly regenerate sigs in archvies; but there probably isn't any way to fix that since I doubt Slashdot retains a sig history, and once a bit of JavaScript or whatever is archived (as opposed to the sig itself) the sig is lost.
I'll see what I can do to work in an abuse of their/they're/there or it's/its. :)
When I was in tech support 10 years ago, "How do I get rid of things in the drop-down?" was a common Netscape support question.
Some of them were very cool and didn't say why they wanted to get rid of it. Some said "I accidently hit this link". I think I may have had one or two guys who were honest about it during my entire time there.
...until somebody mentioned the Wing Commander hack.
I used to work at an ISP and helped with the custom browser installers burned onto CD-ROMs. During testing we discovered that NT 4 would behave badly if you started using it too soon after the install had completed. No time to figure that one out. It had to ship.
Solution? Throw up a fake progress dialog that said "configuring settings" that ran for about 30 seconds after everything else was done. We were banking on the user not fiddling with his machine while it was still doing the all-important configuring.
Let me guess. You parlayed that talent into a fortune for a while at the first company you worked for after graduating: Enron.
I think you're taking it a bit too literally. Analogies tend to break down when... they are no longer taken as analogies!
I'm not advocating the direct opposite of Free Trade, which I guess would be sealed borders between all states. Somewhere between that, and zero tarrifs there is a fair tarrif that compensates for the costs of trade.
We've already seen what Globalization does when "the" economy has issues. A housing crisis in the USA doesn't cause issues in China without globalization.
The Free Trade advocates always sold the advantages, which were readily calculable; but ignored the disadvantages which are harder to measure until you actually experience them.
Only now are people beginning to realize something that should have been apparent right from the start: one single, massive economic system is inherently bad. It's like a monopoly. There's no backup.
It's even worse if you take this philosophy and duplicate it outside the financial realm. We already see this with the "war on drugs". Many countries that would like to legalize may not do so, not because of internal resistance; but because they've signed a UN convention.
Now take that, and apply it to ALL the laws. Yuck.
Most people don't like war, but if the alternative is a "one size fits all" solution, there will be times when it doesn't fit, and war becomes the only alternative. They just won't be wars between nation-states anymore. They'll all be civil wars, which are oftentimes far worse.
Also, what about refugees? Tell me, where do the boat people go when everywhere is Cuba?
"Heaven is where the Police are British, the Chefs are French, the Mechanics are German, the Lovers Italian and it's all organised by the Swiss.
Hell is where the Chefs are British, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, the Police are German and it's all organised by the Italians."
The war on drugs is over. Everybody lost.
It shouldn't be more controversial than the reactors that powered Voyager and other deep space probes. There have been protests over some of the more potentially dangerous reactors that might have caused contamination over a wide area if they blew up; but IIRC they launched anyway.
A reactor that small shouldn't require a huge ammount of fissile material. I bet it could blow up in the atmosphere and produce less radiation than we get from a day of coal fired power in the Eastern US. Coal is full of trace radioactive elements, and it adds up when you burn as much as we do.
Well, that helps answer the question Where's George.
Apparently, he's been some pretty nasty places.
Burning Man corp is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Halliburton / Umbrella Corporation
Does that mean you no longer have to worry about losing your security clearance if you attend? I was never cleared, but I used to be around a lot of people who either were, or were planning to be. There was initially this idea of "attend BM, certain denial", but later on it became "they will just ask you a lot more questions".
I cite Clippy as prior art.
Maybe, just maybe, it's one of those PDF dealies where it's not really blacked out because they're just rendering rectangles over text that's still in the document. Yeah, it's a longshot but check on it anyway.
Also, WTF could possibly be so sensitive about a contract for a WEB SITE??? You'd think they have some kind of sense for how much traffic the most popular government sites are getting, and be able to order some colo and stuff based on that. That's what I'd expect to find in there... servers, bandwidth, hourly support rates to handle wierd stuff like DDoS attacks. WTF could possibly be in there that needs to be blacked out for any reason???
[ ] Inherently over the shark right from the start--every counterculture is doomed to devolve into authoritarianism.
[ ] left Bay Area
[X] charging admission
[ ] mentioned on Malcolm in the Middle
[ ] guy burned the man prematurely and got in legal trouble for it