90210? I have a much better ZIP code I use when lying to the web: 20505. Go ahead, look it up, it's interesting. Heh...
I will, actually!
on
SQL Cookbook
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· Score: 2, Insightful
You could pay $39 from BN, or $26.37 at Amazon.
Yup, and I will, because Amazon sucks balls, what with their 1-click patents and "oh, by the way, all that stuff we promised before? Not so much!" privacy policies. Unlike some Slashdotters, I actually put my money where my mouth (or keyboard, if you prefer) is.
While iTunes works well for this, some of us still don't own iPods, and don't like installing a huge program like iTunes just for the podcasting feature.
And some of us don't run Windoze or MacOS. There's this crazy new thing called "Linux" out there these days - maybe some of you Slashdot folks have heard of it?;-)
Unicode is of no use to those of us in these great United States! Everyone here speaks English, except those who don't, and to hell with them (literally - they're going to hell for being foreigners)! If you use Unicode, or even want to, the terrorists have won!
When the transition from CW (Morse radiotelegraphy) to voice was made, there were obvious, undeniable advantages to voice transmissions over CW. Anyone could "decode" such transmissions without Morse training. The data rate was higher, too - Morse tops out (for the vast majority of people, anyway) at about 40 WPM (words per minute), at least for by-ear decoding. The spoken word can easily exceed that (at the price of higher bandwidth, of course).
But the real answer to your question is, "The difference is that the FCC didn't license voice transmissions only to huge, billion-dollar corporations."
You know, I almost made an anonymous post to the effect of, "Who cares if the president of the Gay Club for Queers can't get his AOL mail," but upon reflection it occurred to me that no self-respecting gay man would be caught dead using something as tacky and unfashionable as AOL.
You've got to be kidding! I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the bulk of the money floating around the tech sector comes from businesses, governments and universities - not Grandma buying an eMachine at Circuit City.
People like Grandma are often not even worth dealing with from a purely economic standpoint. Any profit an independent PC tech stands to make servicing their machines is eaten up by the hours and hours of free tech support these people expect because they paid you to install their printer back in 2001.
Computers are becoming more and more necessary for everyday life. Sure, you can get by without one, just like some people get by without a telephone or a car. But it sure does make life difficult, and most people aren't going to make such a sacrifice. So it's them who need us, not the other way around. And despite our best efforts to grit our teeth and smile politely when Joe Dumbass clicks "yes, please God, install this malware!" for the seventeenth time this month, we geeks are occasionally going to let a little hint of elitism. I think we're entitled.
I was having a discussion with someone at work not too long ago about this. She was bitching that techs like me are unreasonable to expect everyone to know what they're doing. She said, oh so cleverly, "But can you fix your own car!" Ooh, yeah, ya got me there, I'm not a mechanic (yet, anyway)! But I'm not expecting the average user to be a hardcore geek. To use the car analogy, I don't expect anyone to be a mechanic, I just expect them not to drive around plowing into other vehicles or the occasional stationary object and expecting me to repair their car every time. Well, and maybe to use their goddamn turn signal once in a while.
My first computer was a Timex/Sinclair 1000 as well, back when I was 10 years old. I taught myself to program in BASIC on that thing. It had a tendency to overheat and crash on hot summer days, so I took to cooling it with a baggie of ice sitting over the hot spot on the case. The case was molded plastic and the keyboard was a membrane-type, so the condensation from the baggie didn't really bother the computer any. And I never had a crash as long as that ice was there. Kids these days, they think they're so 1337 with their water-cooling rigs...
Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure
on
MythTV 0.19 Released
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· Score: 1
Thank you! I even went to Urban Dictionary looking for a definition for that and didn't find one.
OK, so when Robert Plant sang, "If there's a bustle in your hedge-row, don't be alarmed now," he wasn't just all hopped up on goofballs or something. He was talking about kids trying to sneak through your yard. I don't think I'll ever understand those wacky Englishmen.
I've been itching to get into FTA for years, but only got around to doing so a couple months ago. The simplest possible setup you'll need is:
A dish
An LNB (low noise block downconverter, which sits at the focal point of the dish)
A receiver
Because I wasn't really sure about FTA I wanted to get into it as cheaply as possible. I bought a cheap 0.3dB LNB and a truly crappy receiver on eBay, used an old Primestar 40" x 30" dish (which turns out to be one of the best dishes you can get for FTA), hooked it all up, got it aimed at Intelsat Americas 5 and started watching! I think my total equipment investment was in the neighborhood of $100. I did replace my craptastic receiver with a more expensive ($150 at the time) Fortec Lifetime Classic, but it was worth it. You can, as others have said, go with PC-based solutions, too - PCI or USB satellite receivers - but I wanted a standalone receiver just to start.
Yes, as others have pointed out, most of what's available via FTA in North America is religious programming or bizarre foreign channels, but don't let that discourage you! First of all, that stuff ranges from entertaining to totally weird (like the old animated Star Trek series dubbed in Armenian, or some damned thing). If you're sick of the crap on American TV, this'll definitely give you something more interesting to check out. Second, there are some American channels up there, especially PBS and the like, but some network affiliates as well. And if you're really determined, you can find network feeds, where the networks send their shows to their affiliate stations in the clear, before they officially air. You can also find news crews out in the field, often doing flattering things like swearing and picking their noses before as they set up and test their equipment before a remote report.
FTA is like the Wild West of television. It's not always easy to find the good stuff, but it's worth the effort.
Check out the SatelliteGuys forum if you want more information. The people there are extremely friendly, helpful and knowledgeable. I'm just a user there, not an admin or owner, so I'm not trying to shill for the site or anything. I just love it.
Why is it every time I think up something reasonably clever, someone else beats me to the punch?
Oh, right. 'Cause I have to actually do it. Damn that procrastination...
My thought wasn't to put network traffic to music, but to sniff packets and generate tones of various waveforms based on the contents of those packets. I figured it would be a handy tool to get an overview of what the network was doing and to detect problems by ear.
Get rid of incandescents! They generate waste heat like hell and are expensive to run. Go flourescent as much as you can. We switched out our outdoor lights too (including former mercury bulb yard lights) with this and have seen a noticable drop in electric rates.
Mercury vapor and (high-pressure sodium and metal halide lights, too) are more efficient than flourescent! The only reason they're not used for indoor residential lighting is because the spectrum is nowhere near that of sunlight. Flourescent lighting is the most efficient type of lighting that also produces a reasonable spectrum. But for sheer photons-per-watt efficiency, HPS, MH and mercury vapor all beat flourescent.
I generally find the exact opposite to be true. I suppose, though, that it depends on whether the source material's interest is primarily visual or audio. For news programs and the like, the audio is probably much more important than the video. For pr0n, the audio track can be missing and 8 out of 10 viewers won't even notice. Heh...
In any case, for video watched on a TV vs. a computer monitor, I find that even 320x240 is very watchable (roughly equivalent to VHS videotape, I think) if the frame rate remains at 30 fps. Even 512x384 looks horrible to my eye if the frame rate is 15 fps.
How is RIM relevant to me?
on
Hopes Rise for RIM
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Am I the only person here who's never used a Blackberry and never known anyone who's used one?
Yes, I know some genius is going to reply "Yes." and probably get modded +5, Funny for it. But I'm serious. I've never seen one of these things in use.
It's not that they're stupid. They're simply unaware of how the Internet works.
Actually, it is quite stupid. Not knowing how the Internet works is simply ignorance, and is easily fixed. The stupid part is posting sensitive personal information in a medium you don't understand.
The man who designed that device? A brilliant Russian engineer named Leon Theremin. Yes, the same one who invented the musical instrument that bears his name.
I know a lot of people here are saying, "Oh, stop whining, it's just a name/just a game/whatever," but really, I don't think that those of us who dwell in an online realm of any sort - games, forums, chat sites, whatever - can help but feel a little betrayed when the Powers That Be decide that we are unworthy and must be slapped down. Christ, I don't even participate all that much on Slashdot, but I was still a bit disappointed when I discovered that I apparently have been banned from moderating. I used to meta-moderate fairly often, I have excellent karma, and I often found myself with mod points. Well, at some point that just stopped happening. I have no idea why, or how. And it's far from a big deal - hell, I have a life - but it still bugged me a bit. So yeah, I know what you mean.
My heart bleeds for the little rich kids who are pissed off that their expensive plastic toys don't look as nice as they did when they first came out of the box! Never mind that the world is full of people who can't even drink clean/safe water every day...
Honestly, I'm not trying to say that people should spend their money buying sanitation systems for poor African countries, but fuckin' A, people, let's keep things in perspective!
OK, I thought I wasn't going to get into this, but I can't resist.
First, let me say that I'm a mostly-happy GAIM user. I use it primarily on Linux, but I use the Windoze port as well. Most of my friends are on Yahoo Messenger, so let's take some examples from there. Others will be more generic complaints.
1. The official Yahoo client lets me log in invisibly. This is incredibly useful when you want to check your IM's, check the status of others, or hold a one-on-one chat and don't want a bunch of people pestering you all at once. GAIM forces you to log in, then change your status to invisible. That's a dead giveaway to anyone watching that you're actually online, but "hiding." This is a perfect example of developers who write reasonably good code but don't actually put any thought into how people use the application. Trust me, when you have a bunch of people on your contact list, some of whom you want to talk to much more than others, you want to be able to log in invisibly.
2. Every official IM client I've ever used allows me to send an IM with <tab><space>. <tab> shifts the focus from the text entry field to the "Send" button, and presses the Send button. And that's how I'd been doing it for years. This doesn't work in GAIM, though! Oh, heavens no! GAIM, in its infinite wisdom, inserts a tab into my text when I hit the tab key. Have you ever wanted to insert a tab into an IM? Do you know anyone who has? Me either. So where's the harm in making <tab> shift focus like it does in every other application??? None, that's what! But as it stands now I was forced to retrain myself when a few lines of code could have solved this problem. Again, programmers writing code without thinking about how people use the program.
3. No Yahoo video or voice support, even though the code exists for it. I hang out on a message board with a chat room where lots of people there use YM to send video to each other. Some of these people are women who will show me their boobs (for free, even!) You can see why this matters so much to me.
4. Status/"Away" messages: With official IM clients, I can set my "away" status to just about anything I like, quickly and easily. In GAIM, I'm forced to create a a new custom away message through a long series of menu clicks. Then if I want to use it, it forces me to keep a stupid dialog box on the screen, or minimized to the task bar, with a stupid "I'm back!" button. This might work if "Away" messages were exclusively used for telling people that you're not at your keyboard, but nobody actually uses it that way! Hell, when I lived with my ex-girlfriend and her teenage kids, they'd use their status messages to tell their friends every time they did anything, or just to put up stupid messages to amuse people. I used to do the same sort of stuff when I had the official Yahoo client. But most of all, sometimes you just want to appear to be away when you're really not (a variation on the logging-on-invisible theme above). I don't want a stupid dialog box hanging around just because I changed my status to something other than "I'm here!" Once again, programmers write good code, but they don't put any thought into how people actually use the software. Are you starting to see a theme here?
5. While we're on the topic of status/away messages, why doesn't GAIM reflect my away status visually? The system tray icon should change, at minimum, as should the icons in my buddy list for the various IM networks (YM, ICQ, etc.) depending on my status in those individual networks. I realize that the question of which status to display in the system tray comes up when you set a different status for different IM networks, but how the hell often does anyone do that? I'm going to guess that most people want their status to be consistent across the board 99.8% of the time, so whatever hack you implement to deal with the 0.2% will just have to do.
Slashdot Mirror
90210? I have a much better ZIP code I use when lying to the web: 20505. Go ahead, look it up, it's interesting. Heh...
You could pay $39 from BN, or $26.37 at Amazon.
Yup, and I will, because Amazon sucks balls, what with their 1-click patents and "oh, by the way, all that stuff we promised before? Not so much!" privacy policies. Unlike some Slashdotters, I actually put my money where my mouth (or keyboard, if you prefer) is.
While iTunes works well for this, some of us still don't own iPods, and don't like installing a huge program like iTunes just for the podcasting feature.
;-)
And some of us don't run Windoze or MacOS. There's this crazy new thing called "Linux" out there these days - maybe some of you Slashdot folks have heard of it?
For those of us who aren't homosexual graphic designers from San Francisco^W^W^W^W^W^W Mac users, could you explain what this "Genie effect" is?
Unicode is of no use to those of us in these great United States! Everyone here speaks English, except those who don't, and to hell with them (literally - they're going to hell for being foreigners)! If you use Unicode, or even want to, the terrorists have won!
God bless America
When the transition from CW (Morse radiotelegraphy) to voice was made, there were obvious, undeniable advantages to voice transmissions over CW. Anyone could "decode" such transmissions without Morse training. The data rate was higher, too - Morse tops out (for the vast majority of people, anyway) at about 40 WPM (words per minute), at least for by-ear decoding. The spoken word can easily exceed that (at the price of higher bandwidth, of course).
But the real answer to your question is, "The difference is that the FCC didn't license voice transmissions only to huge, billion-dollar corporations."
You know, I almost made an anonymous post to the effect of, "Who cares if the president of the Gay Club for Queers can't get his AOL mail," but upon reflection it occurred to me that no self-respecting gay man would be caught dead using something as tacky and unfashionable as AOL.
You've got to be kidding! I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the bulk of the money floating around the tech sector comes from businesses, governments and universities - not Grandma buying an eMachine at Circuit City.
People like Grandma are often not even worth dealing with from a purely economic standpoint. Any profit an independent PC tech stands to make servicing their machines is eaten up by the hours and hours of free tech support these people expect because they paid you to install their printer back in 2001.
Computers are becoming more and more necessary for everyday life. Sure, you can get by without one, just like some people get by without a telephone or a car. But it sure does make life difficult, and most people aren't going to make such a sacrifice. So it's them who need us, not the other way around. And despite our best efforts to grit our teeth and smile politely when Joe Dumbass clicks "yes, please God, install this malware!" for the seventeenth time this month, we geeks are occasionally going to let a little hint of elitism. I think we're entitled.
I was having a discussion with someone at work not too long ago about this. She was bitching that techs like me are unreasonable to expect everyone to know what they're doing. She said, oh so cleverly, "But can you fix your own car!" Ooh, yeah, ya got me there, I'm not a mechanic (yet, anyway)! But I'm not expecting the average user to be a hardcore geek. To use the car analogy, I don't expect anyone to be a mechanic, I just expect them not to drive around plowing into other vehicles or the occasional stationary object and expecting me to repair their car every time. Well, and maybe to use their goddamn turn signal once in a while.
My first computer was a Timex/Sinclair 1000 as well, back when I was 10 years old. I taught myself to program in BASIC on that thing. It had a tendency to overheat and crash on hot summer days, so I took to cooling it with a baggie of ice sitting over the hot spot on the case. The case was molded plastic and the keyboard was a membrane-type, so the condensation from the baggie didn't really bother the computer any. And I never had a crash as long as that ice was there. Kids these days, they think they're so 1337 with their water-cooling rigs...
Thank you! I even went to Urban Dictionary looking for a definition for that and didn't find one.
OK, so when Robert Plant sang, "If there's a bustle in your hedge-row, don't be alarmed now," he wasn't just all hopped up on goofballs or something. He was talking about kids trying to sneak through your yard. I don't think I'll ever understand those wacky Englishmen.
Because I wasn't really sure about FTA I wanted to get into it as cheaply as possible. I bought a cheap 0.3dB LNB and a truly crappy receiver on eBay, used an old Primestar 40" x 30" dish (which turns out to be one of the best dishes you can get for FTA), hooked it all up, got it aimed at Intelsat Americas 5 and started watching! I think my total equipment investment was in the neighborhood of $100. I did replace my craptastic receiver with a more expensive ($150 at the time) Fortec Lifetime Classic, but it was worth it. You can, as others have said, go with PC-based solutions, too - PCI or USB satellite receivers - but I wanted a standalone receiver just to start.
Yes, as others have pointed out, most of what's available via FTA in North America is religious programming or bizarre foreign channels, but don't let that discourage you! First of all, that stuff ranges from entertaining to totally weird (like the old animated Star Trek series dubbed in Armenian, or some damned thing). If you're sick of the crap on American TV, this'll definitely give you something more interesting to check out. Second, there are some American channels up there, especially PBS and the like, but some network affiliates as well. And if you're really determined, you can find network feeds, where the networks send their shows to their affiliate stations in the clear, before they officially air. You can also find news crews out in the field, often doing flattering things like swearing and picking their noses before as they set up and test their equipment before a remote report.
FTA is like the Wild West of television. It's not always easy to find the good stuff, but it's worth the effort.
Check out the SatelliteGuys forum if you want more information. The people there are extremely friendly, helpful and knowledgeable. I'm just a user there, not an admin or owner, so I'm not trying to shill for the site or anything. I just love it.
Why is it every time I think up something reasonably clever, someone else beats me to the punch?
Oh, right. 'Cause I have to actually do it. Damn that procrastination...
My thought wasn't to put network traffic to music, but to sniff packets and generate tones of various waveforms based on the contents of those packets. I figured it would be a handy tool to get an overview of what the network was doing and to detect problems by ear.
Get rid of incandescents! They generate waste heat like hell and are expensive to run. Go flourescent as much as you can. We switched out our outdoor lights too (including former mercury bulb yard lights) with this and have seen a noticable drop in electric rates.
Mercury vapor and (high-pressure sodium and metal halide lights, too) are more efficient than flourescent! The only reason they're not used for indoor residential lighting is because the spectrum is nowhere near that of sunlight. Flourescent lighting is the most efficient type of lighting that also produces a reasonable spectrum. But for sheer photons-per-watt efficiency, HPS, MH and mercury vapor all beat flourescent.
I generally find the exact opposite to be true. I suppose, though, that it depends on whether the source material's interest is primarily visual or audio. For news programs and the like, the audio is probably much more important than the video. For pr0n, the audio track can be missing and 8 out of 10 viewers won't even notice. Heh...
In any case, for video watched on a TV vs. a computer monitor, I find that even 320x240 is very watchable (roughly equivalent to VHS videotape, I think) if the frame rate remains at 30 fps. Even 512x384 looks horrible to my eye if the frame rate is 15 fps.
Am I the only person here who's never used a Blackberry and never known anyone who's used one?
Yes, I know some genius is going to reply "Yes." and probably get modded +5, Funny for it. But I'm serious. I've never seen one of these things in use.
Meanwhile here in Canada yet another election has been conducted without any problem using simple paper ballots.
Well, assuming you can consider a win by the Conservatives as being "without any problem."
Will this dissuade news sites from blogging in the future?
Christ, I hope so!
No way - that's science fiction! It'll look exactly like this.
It's not that they're stupid. They're simply unaware of how the Internet works.
Actually, it is quite stupid. Not knowing how the Internet works is simply ignorance, and is easily fixed. The stupid part is posting sensitive personal information in a medium you don't understand.
The man who designed that device? A brilliant Russian engineer named Leon Theremin. Yes, the same one who invented the musical instrument that bears his name.
I know a lot of people here are saying, "Oh, stop whining, it's just a name/just a game/whatever," but really, I don't think that those of us who dwell in an online realm of any sort - games, forums, chat sites, whatever - can help but feel a little betrayed when the Powers That Be decide that we are unworthy and must be slapped down. Christ, I don't even participate all that much on Slashdot, but I was still a bit disappointed when I discovered that I apparently have been banned from moderating. I used to meta-moderate fairly often, I have excellent karma, and I often found myself with mod points. Well, at some point that just stopped happening. I have no idea why, or how. And it's far from a big deal - hell, I have a life - but it still bugged me a bit. So yeah, I know what you mean.
My heart bleeds for the little rich kids who are pissed off that their expensive plastic toys don't look as nice as they did when they first came out of the box! Never mind that the world is full of people who can't even drink clean/safe water every day...
Honestly, I'm not trying to say that people should spend their money buying sanitation systems for poor African countries, but fuckin' A, people, let's keep things in perspective!
OK, I thought I wasn't going to get into this, but I can't resist.
First, let me say that I'm a mostly-happy GAIM user. I use it primarily on Linux, but I use the Windoze port as well. Most of my friends are on Yahoo Messenger, so let's take some examples from there. Others will be more generic complaints.
1. The official Yahoo client lets me log in invisibly. This is incredibly useful when you want to check your IM's, check the status of others, or hold a one-on-one chat and don't want a bunch of people pestering you all at once. GAIM forces you to log in, then change your status to invisible. That's a dead giveaway to anyone watching that you're actually online, but "hiding." This is a perfect example of developers who write reasonably good code but don't actually put any thought into how people use the application. Trust me, when you have a bunch of people on your contact list, some of whom you want to talk to much more than others, you want to be able to log in invisibly.
2. Every official IM client I've ever used allows me to send an IM with <tab><space>. <tab> shifts the focus from the text entry field to the "Send" button, and presses the Send button. And that's how I'd been doing it for years. This doesn't work in GAIM, though! Oh, heavens no! GAIM, in its infinite wisdom, inserts a tab into my text when I hit the tab key. Have you ever wanted to insert a tab into an IM? Do you know anyone who has? Me either. So where's the harm in making <tab> shift focus like it does in every other application??? None, that's what! But as it stands now I was forced to retrain myself when a few lines of code could have solved this problem. Again, programmers writing code without thinking about how people use the program.
3. No Yahoo video or voice support, even though the code exists for it. I hang out on a message board with a chat room where lots of people there use YM to send video to each other. Some of these people are women who will show me their boobs (for free, even!) You can see why this matters so much to me.
4. Status/"Away" messages: With official IM clients, I can set my "away" status to just about anything I like, quickly and easily. In GAIM, I'm forced to create a a new custom away message through a long series of menu clicks. Then if I want to use it, it forces me to keep a stupid dialog box on the screen, or minimized to the task bar, with a stupid "I'm back!" button. This might work if "Away" messages were exclusively used for telling people that you're not at your keyboard, but nobody actually uses it that way! Hell, when I lived with my ex-girlfriend and her teenage kids, they'd use their status messages to tell their friends every time they did anything, or just to put up stupid messages to amuse people. I used to do the same sort of stuff when I had the official Yahoo client. But most of all, sometimes you just want to appear to be away when you're really not (a variation on the logging-on-invisible theme above). I don't want a stupid dialog box hanging around just because I changed my status to something other than "I'm here!" Once again, programmers write good code, but they don't put any thought into how people actually use the software. Are you starting to see a theme here?
5. While we're on the topic of status/away messages, why doesn't GAIM reflect my away status visually? The system tray icon should change, at minimum, as should the icons in my buddy list for the various IM networks (YM, ICQ, etc.) depending on my status in those individual networks. I realize that the question of which status to display in the system tray comes up when you set a different status for different IM networks, but how the hell often does anyone do that? I'm going to guess that most people want their status to be consistent across the board 99.8% of the time, so whatever hack you implement to deal with the 0.2% will just have to do.
I could go on, but those are my major complaints.
Check out the Basics of Space Flight page at NASA's Jet Propultion Laboratory.