It's a good thing I thought this through...
on
Sysadmin Day. Yay.
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· Score: 2
...because I thought it would be a point of greatest irony if I were to take my incredible graphic artist skills (okay, so now y'all know I'm lying...) and conjure up a three-megabyte "We love you, sysadmin!" attachment so that every user on everyone's network can flood their sysadmin's inbox with it every last Friday in July.
...but then I realized that for utmost irony, it would have to be done in Powerpoint. I can only stoop so low...
3. Going to the moon was a competitive race. Going to Mars will be a collective journey.
That's exactly the problem. On 3 October, 1957, nothing Man had ever built had be placed in Space. On 20 July 1969, Man first set foot on the moon. Just shy of a dozen years from "Hm, maybe there's Space out there" to "Tranquility base here. The Eagle has landed."
Today, there is a space station in orbit and we have shuttle flights to it few months. Twelve years ago... there was a space station in orbit and there were Soyuz flights to it every few months. Wow, now that's cooperative progress!
Add to that that man hasn't set foot on the moon at all in that time-- or in the twelve years previous to that, either. What, is there nothing more to learn on the moon?
It sounds good on paper and even better on Star Trek, but so far, humanity's track record with space exploration as anything other than "My god we can't let the Reds do that first!" hasn't been exactly stellar. Humans, it seems, are at their best when they compete. -JDF
I have never heard an environmentalist opposed to solar or wind power. Come to think of it, I have never heard anyone strongly opposed to solar and wind power, except people whose livelihood depends on the continued consumption of non-renewable resources.
Of course they're not opposed to the idea of solar or wind power. Now go try to build a solar or wind power plant.
"You can't put it there! There's trees there! Oh, not there! You'll confuse the antelopes..."
than I would have if I'd have bought it off the shelf.
On the other hand, I've always gotten exactly what I wanted under the hood, and I wouldn't have if I'd've bought off the shelf. I'd've wound up with a chassis-of-the-week instead of my nicely cooling one, who knows what CAS latency on the RAM, whoever's motherboard-of-the-week...
Instead, what I've got cost me more, but it's what I wanted.
From the article:
MGM and Danjaq, the British company that controls the Bond film license, have obtained a cease-and-desist order from an Industry panel that prohibits New Line from calling the latest installment of Mike Myers' shagadelic spy series Austin Powers in Goldmember.
See the bold part there? They didn't get the cease-and-desist from the Government. This is a private business issue.
And a Motion Picture Association of America arbitration panel sided with MGM.
Ayep. Your friends, the MPAA at work.
If New Line is taking it seriously, then there's probably a contract issue in place here. Chances are, New Line is un-titling their movie because MGM would sue the pants off New Line for releasing it as is, probably a breach-of-contract suit; I would guess stemming from some rules of membership in the MPAA.
While I personally think it's pretty stupid of MGM to push this, it's _entirely legal_. This has nothing to do with copyright law or fair use.
I'd do more of that, too, but the hardware is just so expensive! I mean, you just can't compete without an automag, and then a nitro kit and boy, you go through a full case of paint a day that way! It's so much cheaper to just play Q3...
What do you mean you can play capture-the-flag in meatspace without paintball markers?
Imagine, that when the first version came out, I got me a +2 Sword of Fu. I could sell it for 2000 plat.
Three expansions later, I now have a +40 Sword of Fu. I can sell it for about 2000 plat, and my original Sword of Fu +2 is only valuable in that I can give it to a newbie learning the game.
When the first version came out, I had a Pentium 90, and I bought it for about $2000...
(which doesn't matter to me, my nose doesn't work, ha!), this sounds like a neat thing. A few years ago (okay, better part of a decade ago), I was involved with the Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts' first Expo. (predecessor to the Atlanta Linux Showcase) We got a room down at Georgia Tech, and it was really much like a LAN party before LAN parties were common-- folks brought their own machines in and ran the demos that way, showing to the public what Linux could do, what hardware it could run on, and all sorts of cool stuff.
Now, we had a few dozen machines there, and the infrastructure was non-trivial. Finding a place to host it was tough to begin with, and then, half-way through, I found myself throwing an extension cord over a balcony because we'd blown one of the breakers downstairs. How do you power 5,000 gamers and their Uber-Gamer rigs with the overclocked Athlons and the neon lights under the hood?
We could get away with just a few cheap 10 megabit hubs, but gamers? 5,000 gamers? You're going to need more than just standard 100 megabit switches; you're really looking at Cisco Catalyst class hardware. The infrastructure to this thing, set up for only six days, must be mind-boggling. And you know how it always goes, you show up to a LAN party and there's always one guy who can't seem to get his machine on the network... Now there's a thousand of him... How do you schedule games? There's 5,000 people here, you're not gonna want to frag the same ones for six days straight...
And after you've looked at all that, how you do it all at a price that'll still attract 5000 gamers, that's the impressive part...
I can't even convince seventeen members of my not-so-immediate family to quit sending me seventeen copies of the latest chain mail or dancing baby. What makes him think I'm going to be able to convince them to quit sending me these things in Microsoft proprietary formats?!
No, surely, our beloved City is unprepared for gigantic blue justice striding upon the rooftops of their daily lives. The forces of truth and justice fall silent this day, but they shall rise again like the head to the top of a cold one, if you know what I mean, chum. Yes, evildoers and television programming execs, you have won this round, but as sure as the sun will rise over the dark jungles of Tibet, your day in that sun will be over, and then you shall again face... The Tick.
It's a pretty blue book that says "Passport" on the front.
But yeah, not everybody has one of those like they do those blue cards that say "Social Security" on the front with a name and a random nine-digit number...
When Time Magazine noticed us folks at Georgia Tech were stuffing the ballot box trying to get George P. Burdell named Person of the Year, they removed all the votes for him.
I think that's sufficient precedent to remove all the votes for.NET.
I couldn't understand what made Solaris x86 such a great idea... when the HCL could be printed legibly on a postage stamp, it just seemed to me that running Solaris on your x86 machine made about as much sense as running Windows NT on your Sparc 5...
Now, if they would have done some emulator work and given (slow) binary compatability, I could see why one might want to spend a kilobuck on a cheap PC instead of five on a cheap Sparc, but as it sat, I couldn't make heads or tails of what market it was aimed at.
-JDF
A couple interesting things about Microdrives...
on
IBM 1GB Microdrive Review
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· Score: 3, Informative
Not all digital cameras that claim to take type-II compactflash can handle microdrives. A microdrive generates more heat than does a CF card, and also sucks more power when it spins up. Caveat emptor when doing this-- my Canon G1, for example, handles a microdrive just fine (though Canon says they don't officially support it), but a friend of mine's G1 doesn't; his is a little older than mine.
If you can do PCMCIA, you can get more space for cheaper than the Compact-flash Microdrive. Toshiba makes 5GB type II PCMCIA hard disks now. So if the idea was to turn your iPaq into an iPod, you'd be better off getting the bigger disk.
To the people talking about 20 GB units and such: Take a look some day at the difference in size between the laptop hard disk in a 20GB mp3 player and a Microdrive, or even the iPod's 5GB PCMCIA disk. The size difference is mind boggling.Sure, it's not for all solutions, but it's pretty darned cool for the solutions it is for.
So for most of us, starting to do your own automotive repair is going to be a losing fight in the money department. Sure, we look at $300 for the garage to replace an alternator, but when you don't yet own even the most basic tools, you'll wind up paying that amount to Sears for some nice Craftsman hardware instead.
On the other hand, you rarely have to upgrade the trusty 1/2 inch socket driver, so once you have collected most of the tools, things get cheaper as time goes along and you begin to be able to solve problems under the hood with only the tools you have.
Personally, I think it's a completely reasonable thing for a geek to do his own auto repair. In my case, it was darned near required-- I hate black magic. I refused to believe that I could not figure out what was going wrong with my truck.
I learned a few things along the way:
Get good tools. Now, I'm not saying to take out a second mortgage for some MAC or Snap-On like the pros use, but get decent stuff. I personally swear by Craftsman; It's "good enough" that you won't round off bolts, but still guaranteed forever.
RTFM! If you're just starting out, pick up a Haynes manual on your vehicle. It's not the most useful thing once you know a bit more about what you're doing, but they're great for starting out. Once you're past that point, it might be worth your while to splurge on a set of factory service manuals for your car. Some makes, they're reasonably priced, but for others, they're way too expensive for anyone but a real shop mechanic.
Gojo. Don't dink around trying to wash up with a bar of Ivory. Get the Gojo.
Make sure you still have transportation. Nothing is more annoying than having half your engine on the workbench and realizing you don't havea tool you need. Or getting everything almost back together and putting a screwdriver through the main water hose... Having someone around (or another vehicle) that you can make a parts run with is handy.
Older cars tend to be easier to work on. This is not so much because of all the computerized stuff people gripe about, but more because older cars tend to be laid out with a large engine bay holding an engine, and smaller ones have a small engine bay holding an engine and a transmission. It's tougher to get at what you're working on in, say, a '99 Neon, than it is on, say, my '69 Coronet.
Yeah, but my buddy from Mars says they don't use UTC there. If it's not even coordinated throughout the solar system,where do we get off thinking it's coordinated throughout the universe?
Not a solution, but a silly question:
on
Flying on Mars
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· Score: 2
Why would we need to fly there? Man made satellites are already in place that map the surface of the planet. There aren't any forests or rivers to block your path, why not just build the equivalent of a Jeep with ten meter tall balloon tires and drive wherever you want to go? I would guess that an engine that puts out sufficient torque to do that would still be more fuel efficient than, say, a rocket, and balloon tires ought to be easier to build than a hundred-meter wingspan...
There aren't that many vertical cliff faces on Mars, are there?
Indeed. The comment I heard about the department where I (eventually) got my CS degree was "Teaching a computer scientist how to program is like teaching an electrical engineer to use a soldering iron."
One question to ponder: Would we really want cameras on our cell-phones?
Well, you and I, not at the moment. We geeks look at our phone, we look at our PDA, and we see two separate devices.
But our phones now have built-in contact management software. My brother's phone has "wireless web"-- not the real Internet, but a surprising amount of crap can be found. This leads me to believe that the general public wants their phone to be a PDA.
Now, look at us, supposively the bleeding edge. We're installing the intimate distribution of Linux on our iPaq's. We carry around a gig of mp3 in our pocket, or maybe even a half a season of Babylon 5. We're basically turning our PDAs into baby versions of our personal computers. People want their cellphone to be a PDA, we want our PDAs to be real computers, so why not cellphones as computers? [0] Our computers have webcams, we buy digital firewire camcorders, so why not have the one we carry on our belt support webcams? Sure, I think the real bandwidth will go the other direction, as bored business travelers waiting for their delayed flight to leave sit there watching last night's episode of ER on their cellphone, but why not also be able to send video outbound?
[0] I do see one problem with this: interface. Right now, we don't know how to make a usable general purpose interface for a computer small enough to put it on a cellphone, and the other feature trend in cellphones is "as small as you can still fit a day's worth of battery into."
The only way to get a gig on a PDA is to find one that takes CompactFlash and use the IBM 1GB CompactFlash microdrive... complete with moving parts!
That's the cheaper way to do it, but an iPaq with a dual-PCMCIA slot adapter and a pair of 512 meg
CF cards will do it without moving parts. 1GB CF cards are on the horizon but not here yet.
Or, you can use that same dual-PCMCIA slot adapter and pop a pair of Toshiba 5GB PCMCIA hard disks in it for a 10 GB PDA, though you are back in the realm of moving parts.
You can do some pretty sick things with PDAs nowadays. When I spent six weeks in Europe recently, my digital camera's storage brick consisted of an iPaq with a 20GB laptop hard disk. This link will take you to a site with details on the storage brick.
I have, at various times, considered getting a high-speed network connection for the grilfiend. I had two problems: first, good DSL service in her area is unavailable (distance from the CO coupled with going across the 'Hooch). So that left cable, but the single cable outlet in the apartment is diametrically across the living room (well, no, it's not a circle, but you know what I mean) from the computer.
And, of course, it being her apartment and not mine, running cat5 across the room is not an option. So I thought wireless, but I'm not willing to throw an extra $300 at the problem (yet.)
This, on the other hand, might be a solution. So my big question is: How much? When you figure that Linksys's WAP + routerator is a little less than $200 at the local Best Buy, and I can get a PCI or USB wireless card for the PC end for $100, can IP-over-110vAC really be much cheaper?
I mean it's nice, but much too complicated and expensive. Why not use cheap, existing technology, i.e. combustion motors? They can be fueled by alcohol, methane and even hydrogen (BWM is already series-producing a hydrogen-fueled 750).
The trouble's not the technology, it's the infrastructure. Sure, you can go buy a hydrogen-powered BMW today, the trouble is that "hydrogen stations" aren't nearly as ubiquitous as "gas stations".
That's really the problem. People who run gas stations probably wouldn't so much mind running alternative-fuel stations instead, but the cost of adding an alternative fuel to their current offerings is such that they're not willing to gamble on whether that fuel is going to be alcohol, methane, hydrogen, or who knows what else. So we're going to be stuck with gas stations for a while.
So, we'll need weird "expensive and complicated" technology...
Slashdot Mirror
-JDF
3. Going to the moon was a competitive race. Going to Mars will be a collective journey.
That's exactly the problem. On 3 October, 1957, nothing Man had ever built had be placed in Space. On 20 July 1969, Man first set foot on the moon. Just shy of a dozen years from "Hm, maybe there's Space out there" to "Tranquility base here. The Eagle has landed."
Today, there is a space station in orbit and we have shuttle flights to it few months. Twelve years ago... there was a space station in orbit and there were Soyuz flights to it every few months. Wow, now that's cooperative progress!
Add to that that man hasn't set foot on the moon at all in that time-- or in the twelve years previous to that, either. What, is there nothing more to learn on the moon?
It sounds good on paper and even better on Star Trek, but so far, humanity's track record with space exploration as anything other than "My god we can't let the Reds do that first!" hasn't been exactly stellar. Humans, it seems, are at their best when they compete.
-JDF
I have never heard an environmentalist opposed to solar or wind power. Come to think of it, I have never heard anyone strongly opposed to solar and wind power, except people whose livelihood depends on the continued consumption of non-renewable resources.
Of course they're not opposed to the idea of solar or wind power. Now go try to build a solar or wind power plant.
"You can't put it there! There's trees there! Oh, not there! You'll confuse the antelopes..."
-JDF
than I would have if I'd have bought it off the shelf.
On the other hand, I've always gotten exactly what I wanted under the hood, and I wouldn't have if I'd've bought off the shelf. I'd've wound up with a chassis-of-the-week instead of my nicely cooling one, who knows what CAS latency on the RAM, whoever's motherboard-of-the-week...
Instead, what I've got cost me more, but it's what I wanted.
-JDF
If you call yourself a thief and all you do is pirate, you're a pretty piss poor thief, you should learn better kinds of theft.
-JDF
From the article:
MGM and Danjaq, the British company that controls the Bond film license, have obtained a cease-and-desist order from an Industry panel that prohibits New Line from calling the latest installment of Mike Myers' shagadelic spy series Austin Powers in Goldmember.
See the bold part there? They didn't get the cease-and-desist from the Government. This is a private business issue.
And a Motion Picture Association of America arbitration panel sided with MGM.
Ayep. Your friends, the MPAA at work.
If New Line is taking it seriously, then there's probably a contract issue in place here. Chances are, New Line is un-titling their movie because MGM would sue the pants off New Line for releasing it as is, probably a breach-of-contract suit; I would guess stemming from some rules of membership in the MPAA.
While I personally think it's pretty stupid of MGM to push this, it's _entirely legal_. This has nothing to do with copyright law or fair use.
-JDF
I'd do more of that, too, but the hardware is just so expensive! I mean, you just can't compete without an automag, and then a nitro kit and boy, you go through a full case of paint a day that way! It's so much cheaper to just play Q3...
What do you mean you can play capture-the-flag in meatspace without paintball markers?
-JDF (who plays with a stock Tippman '98.)
Imagine, that when the first version came out, I got me a +2 Sword of Fu. I could sell it for 2000 plat.
Three expansions later, I now have a +40 Sword of Fu. I can sell it for about 2000 plat, and my original Sword of Fu +2 is only valuable in that I can give it to a newbie learning the game.
When the first version came out, I had a Pentium 90, and I bought it for about $2000...
-JDF
(which doesn't matter to me, my nose doesn't work, ha!), this sounds like a neat thing. A few years ago (okay, better part of a decade ago), I was involved with the Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts' first Expo. (predecessor to the Atlanta Linux Showcase) We got a room down at Georgia Tech, and it was really much like a LAN party before LAN parties were common-- folks brought their own machines in and ran the demos that way, showing to the public what Linux could do, what hardware it could run on, and all sorts of cool stuff.
Now, we had a few dozen machines there, and the infrastructure was non-trivial. Finding a place to host it was tough to begin with, and then, half-way through, I found myself throwing an extension cord over a balcony because we'd blown one of the breakers downstairs. How do you power 5,000 gamers and their Uber-Gamer rigs with the overclocked Athlons and the neon lights under the hood?
We could get away with just a few cheap 10 megabit hubs, but gamers? 5,000 gamers? You're going to need more than just standard 100 megabit switches; you're really looking at Cisco Catalyst class hardware. The infrastructure to this thing, set up for only six days, must be mind-boggling. And you know how it always goes, you show up to a LAN party and there's always one guy who can't seem to get his machine on the network... Now there's a thousand of him... How do you schedule games? There's 5,000 people here, you're not gonna want to frag the same ones for six days straight...
And after you've looked at all that, how you do it all at a price that'll still attract 5000 gamers, that's the impressive part...
-JDF
I can't even convince seventeen members of my not-so-immediate family to quit sending me seventeen copies of the latest chain mail or dancing baby. What makes him think I'm going to be able to convince them to quit sending me these things in Microsoft proprietary formats?!
No, surely, our beloved City is unprepared for gigantic blue justice striding upon the rooftops of their daily lives. The forces of truth and justice fall silent this day, but they shall rise again like the head to the top of a cold one, if you know what I mean, chum. Yes, evildoers and television programming execs, you have won this round, but as sure as the sun will rise over the dark jungles of Tibet, your day in that sun will be over, and then you shall again face... The Tick.
It's a pretty blue book that says "Passport" on the front.
But yeah, not everybody has one of those like they do those blue cards that say "Social Security" on the front with a name and a random nine-digit number...
-JDF
When Time Magazine noticed us folks at Georgia Tech were stuffing the ballot box trying to get George P. Burdell named Person of the Year, they removed all the votes for him.
.NET.
I think that's sufficient precedent to remove all the votes for
-JDF
I couldn't understand what made Solaris x86 such a great idea... when the HCL could be printed legibly on a postage stamp, it just seemed to me that running Solaris on your x86 machine made about as much sense as running Windows NT on your Sparc 5...
Now, if they would have done some emulator work and given (slow) binary compatability, I could see why one might want to spend a kilobuck on a cheap PC instead of five on a cheap Sparc, but as it sat, I couldn't make heads or tails of what market it was aimed at.
-JDF
Not all digital cameras that claim to take type-II compactflash can handle microdrives. A microdrive generates more heat than does a CF card, and also sucks more power when it spins up. Caveat emptor when doing this-- my Canon G1, for example, handles a microdrive just fine (though Canon says they don't officially support it), but a friend of mine's G1 doesn't; his is a little older than mine.
If you can do PCMCIA, you can get more space for cheaper than the Compact-flash Microdrive. Toshiba makes 5GB type II PCMCIA hard disks now. So if the idea was to turn your iPaq into an iPod, you'd be better off getting the bigger disk.
To the people talking about 20 GB units and such: Take a look some day at the difference in size between the laptop hard disk in a 20GB mp3 player and a Microdrive, or even the iPod's 5GB PCMCIA disk. The size difference is mind boggling.Sure, it's not for all solutions, but it's pretty darned cool for the solutions it is for.
-JDF
On the other hand, you rarely have to upgrade the trusty 1/2 inch socket driver, so once you have collected most of the tools, things get cheaper as time goes along and you begin to be able to solve problems under the hood with only the tools you have.
Personally, I think it's a completely reasonable thing for a geek to do his own auto repair. In my case, it was darned near required-- I hate black magic. I refused to believe that I could not figure out what was going wrong with my truck.
I learned a few things along the way:
Yeah, but my buddy from Mars says they don't use UTC there. If it's not even coordinated throughout the solar system ,where do we get off thinking it's coordinated throughout the universe?
Why would we need to fly there? Man made satellites are already in place that map the surface of the planet. There aren't any forests or rivers to block your path, why not just build the equivalent of a Jeep with ten meter tall balloon tires and drive wherever you want to go? I would guess that an engine that puts out sufficient torque to do that would still be more fuel efficient than, say, a rocket, and balloon tires ought to be easier to build than a hundred-meter wingspan...
There aren't that many vertical cliff faces on Mars, are there?
When I was 19, I had five years of real world experience, too.
Now I'm 28, and I have 9 years of real world experience... All of it in the past 9 years.
-JDF
Indeed. The comment I heard about the department where I (eventually) got my CS degree was "Teaching a computer scientist how to program is like teaching an electrical engineer to use a soldering iron."
I think that covers it pretty well.
-JDF
One question to ponder: Would we really want cameras on our cell-phones?
Well, you and I, not at the moment. We geeks look at our phone, we look at our PDA, and we see two separate devices.
But our phones now have built-in contact management software. My brother's phone has "wireless web"-- not the real Internet, but a surprising amount of crap can be found. This leads me to believe that the general public wants their phone to be a PDA.
Now, look at us, supposively the bleeding edge. We're installing the intimate distribution of Linux on our iPaq's. We carry around a gig of mp3 in our pocket, or maybe even a half a season of Babylon 5. We're basically turning our PDAs into baby versions of our personal computers. People want their cellphone to be a PDA, we want our PDAs to be real computers, so why not cellphones as computers? [0] Our computers have webcams, we buy digital firewire camcorders, so why not have the one we carry on our belt support webcams? Sure, I think the real bandwidth will go the other direction, as bored business travelers waiting for their delayed flight to leave sit there watching last night's episode of ER on their cellphone, but why not also be able to send video outbound?
[0] I do see one problem with this: interface. Right now, we don't know how to make a usable general purpose interface for a computer small enough to put it on a cellphone, and the other feature trend in cellphones is "as small as you can still fit a day's worth of battery into."
-JDF
Haven't you seen the commercials? A huge multi-media advertising blitz to tell us all that _Everything_ is easier in XP.
-JDF
The only way to get a gig on a PDA is to find one that takes CompactFlash and use the IBM 1GB CompactFlash microdrive... complete with moving parts!
That's the cheaper way to do it, but an iPaq with a dual-PCMCIA slot adapter and a pair of 512 meg
CF cards will do it without moving parts. 1GB CF cards are on the horizon but not here yet.
Or, you can use that same dual-PCMCIA slot adapter and pop a pair of Toshiba 5GB PCMCIA hard disks in it for a 10 GB PDA, though you are back in the realm of moving parts.
You can do some pretty sick things with PDAs nowadays. When I spent six weeks in Europe recently, my digital camera's storage brick consisted of an iPaq with a 20GB laptop hard disk. This link will take you to a site with details on the storage brick.
-JDF
I have, at various times, considered getting a high-speed network connection for the grilfiend. I had two problems: first, good DSL service in her area is unavailable (distance from the CO coupled with going across the 'Hooch). So that left cable, but the single cable outlet in the apartment is diametrically across the living room (well, no, it's not a circle, but you know what I mean) from the computer.
And, of course, it being her apartment and not mine, running cat5 across the room is not an option. So I thought wireless, but I'm not willing to throw an extra $300 at the problem (yet.)
This, on the other hand, might be a solution. So my big question is: How much? When you figure that Linksys's WAP + routerator is a little less than $200 at the local Best Buy, and I can get a PCI or USB wireless card for the PC end for $100, can IP-over-110vAC really be much cheaper?
-JDF
I mean it's nice, but much too complicated and expensive. Why not use cheap, existing technology, i.e. combustion motors? They can be fueled by alcohol, methane and even hydrogen (BWM is already series-producing a hydrogen-fueled 750).
The trouble's not the technology, it's the infrastructure. Sure, you can go buy a hydrogen-powered BMW today, the trouble is that "hydrogen stations" aren't nearly as ubiquitous as "gas stations".
That's really the problem. People who run gas stations probably wouldn't so much mind running alternative-fuel stations instead, but the cost of adding an alternative fuel to their current offerings is such that they're not willing to gamble on whether that fuel is going to be alcohol, methane, hydrogen, or who knows what else. So we're going to be stuck with gas stations for a while.
So, we'll need weird "expensive and complicated" technology...
-JDF