ahh, but those under age 24 were not around to experience those first 2 or 3 really GOOD years of MTV when the videos were good, experimental, breaking new ground. And that's all they showed. Of course, after that, MTV became tired, boring, and with the addition of MTV2 and VH1 (et. al.) redundant.
though, if I were the Centre, I would have fired Ms. Parker about 6 seasons ago for gross incompetence. That part always really pissed me off, and this one small thing just made the show completely unwatchable for me.
The only part that was slightly interesting (the hidden crush thing) was overcome with the hokey idea of the gunslinger in space theme that, while interesting, was never taken advantage of, and therefore it lost viewers.
If anything, the "gunslinger" theme, I thought, was the show's weakest point.
For me - it represented a huge forced inconsistency for style's sake. For example, the clothing, the weapons, the furniture, the architecture - all represents a primative technology - and while you could accept that culture might "devolve" to "America old-west" in a post-colonial development and expansion period, which is what this show represents - there's just no damn good reason why the people should wear handmade vintage clothing, eat on old rough-hewn wooden tables, pump water out of the ground with a hand pump, fight with swords or.45 cal. revolvers.
Do they mean to say that back on earth (or on some backwater planet) there still aren't sweatshops full of illiterate children with non-white skin mass producing clothing and furniture for $2.00 a month? Do they mean to say that there's any significant advantage in a fight-situation to using an antique revolver compared to a plasma pistol with laser sighting?
The concept is nice, but it's over done to the point of illogic, and needs more work. (or at least more thought). In my opinion.
However, I really do like the show, watch it fairly religiously (when my DishPlayer doesn't fuck up) and will miss it.
I agree on John Doe. It's "The Pretender" with at least half a brain. (best part: bad guys who fail to "get" the good guy, are killed for their failures. Fired would even be good enough.) But I assume they'll cancel this one too.
The SR-71 is a perfect example of where you can simply throw enough money at a problem and solve it.
Mach 3 comes at a tremendous cost - per flight is on the order of millions of dollars. Which is why the SR-71 was retired.
I have no doubt in my mind that TODAY, we could build a plane that would totally blow the SR-71 out of the water - but nobody wants to spend that kind of money operating it.
Read this week's Cringely, and find out why the computer industry desperately needs you to run an extremely resource hungry server as the backend for one of the most important parts of the OS.
in general, planners are only effective if you carry them 100% of the time with you (while you're awake).
For me, the Palm, even the V, is just plain too big.
Something the size of a credit card just might do it for me, but I think there'd have to be a much faster method of input than the Palm's handwriting mechanism.
I used my Palm for a while, but the combination of replacing batteries, and having this extra big device to carry around (on top of my cell phone and pager) was just too much of a PITA.
during the original WTC bombing, one of the companies I heard about had their offsite backups located in a building just across the mall. Since that area was off-limits for several days due to the hazards and the building inspectors checking things out, and the police gathering evidence, they could not access either their primary data OR their backups, so they had all their workers set up at a hot-site, temp offices, phones, equipment - and no data for several days.
Something like 95% of businesses that had no disaster recovery plan failed within a year of the first bombing.
Then after a few system screw ups from running as admin||root on your personal stuff, you train yourself enough to know when you're doing something risky or stupid
yeah, like rm -rf *; oh wait a second, what directory am I in again?
Wasn't really as good as last year, but the sky was more clear, and on the West coast, the moon was pretty low in the sky by 2:30am.
What I saw were a few average ones, (not a lot of really bright fireballs, many trails, but no trains). And there was an odd pattern to them. We'd see 5-10 of them in the space of about 30 seconds, then nothing, absolutely nothing, for 5-10 minutes, then another little burst. That was pretty much it from 1:45 to 3am, the times I was out. I didn't have time to review my video footage, I assume it's going to suck. I used a Sony DCR-TRV20 with "nightshot" on. Got some good video of my kids oohing and ahhing, but nothing was showing up in the viewfinder at all. I think the key to meteor showers is a wide-angle lens. Or luck.
In my particular situation, as of about two weeks ago, I would have to take a totally mercenary approach. In other words, I'd swallow the money, but I'd hold my nose. For those of us who have house payments, etc. it's the only option.
But now that I have a new job, if my old employer came crawling back now, I would literally laugh at them with the most ridiculous Dr. Evil laugh I can muster. I'm totally serious. My layoff was completely political (well, partially, because she did have to reduce headcount), and was the most harmful choice my manager could have made. For her team, the company, and my family. I have nothing but bitterness. I would only help her if I had no choice.
Bitch and moan all you want about MS breaking apps with each upgrade.
Apple does that too. Anyone running Jaguar yet? Even 10.1 broke some things. 7.5 to 8.0 broke a whole buttload of things, IIRC. And the worst transition was to 9.0. I remember that almost every single shareware app I had broke for 9. I stuck with 8.6 for 2 years because of that.
That's why it's so profitable to be a Mac developer. Your users have to upgrade every 12 months because the OS breaks it.
And no, I'm not talking about the Classic->X upgrade, that's a whole different enchilada. Doesn't count in my book.
okay, so if Alpha particles are electrons, and Beta particles are helium nuclei, and Gamma radiation is photons, then what the hell are all these fast and slow neutrons?
I was recently laid off, and I just got a new job yesterday. Out of the dozens of places I applied at, only one even bothered to send a rejection letter. (plus another one sent a rejection email).
Where did I eventually get a job? A place where a friend works, and pulled some strings for me - they looked at my resume and created a position for me.
Yes, I realize that I am very, very lucky - but it just goes to show; that if you aren't exactly what someone's already looking for, and if you aren't exactly the strongest candidate, your chances of actually getting a job, whether you have all the skills you need, or whether you're so technically good that you can pick up new skills in a trivially short time, are exactly zero.
This is why I never understood that why someone who would go through all the trouble to weaponize anthrax (the 2001 anthrax mailer) wouldn't also take this simple step to also produce it from an antibiotic-resistant strain. Would this not be a simple matter?:
Mix a batch of 100 petri dishes, put varying quantities of antibiotics into each dish, from 1% to 100%. Harvest surviving bacteria from the strongest concentrations in which it survived. Repeat oh, about 100 times. Then do it again with another antibiotic, until you have some antrhax which nothing will kill. Then weaponize and deliver it. Sounds simple. I wonder why they didn't do that - it would also make the strain more difficult to trace by DNA analysis, one would think. . .
Yes, I know there are some issues with taking it orally by the 55 gallon drum, I'm not recommending that at all,
That is an incredibly dangerous understatement! Mostly because there are quacks and charlatans out there trying to sell people orally-adminsterd silver solutions. the "issues" are: It turns your skin grey. PERMANENTLY. ALL of your skin. It ain't pretty.
The best place to pick up a nasty germ is in the hospital since most patiets there are on antibiotics so the only bugs around are highly resistant to a wide range of drugs.
This is why the Republican "healthcare plan" is so great. By not controlling prices of medical treatments and prescription drugs, they'll just let them spiral upwards until only the ultra-rich can afford to stay in hospitals or take antibiotics, giving the non-antibiotic strains a chance to come back in the general population.
and I have two of those little disease vectors called "children."
While I don't think you mean to blame your children, it's really not their fault.
Last year, my kids were homeschooled, and for that entire year, nobody in my family got sick. Not one cold, not one flu, nothing.
This year, we've had our kids back in public school, and we've already had one stomach flu and one cold work it's way through. In two short months.
In previous years, we've had nastiness like chicken pox, measles, and. . . head lice!! All picked up from other kids at public school.
Why do parents send their sick kids to school so they can infect other kids, and spread diseases to their parents?
I personally blame the public school system for head lice. They could DO something about that. But with most families having BOTH parents working, kids can't take a sick day without making one of the parents take a sick day. So the parents send the kids to school in most cases, unless the kid's physically unable to prop themselves up in their desk. So mainly, I'm blaming the crappy labor standards that discourage parents from taking sick days for their kids. And I'm blaming crappy "modern industrialism" for eroding wages to the point where two adults MUST work in a family in order to maintain an average standard of living.
Homeschooling and having my wife stay at home allowed our family incredible freedom, for vacations, etc. But my getting laid off and taking a job where I now make about 2/3 what I was making, changed that situation.
now if only some enterprising storage device manufacturer would make an actual firewire drive, instead of the typical bastardized IDE-with-a-Firewire-bridge crap they've been selling. . .
For me - what I think I need MOST, is a reference for the various unixes. A reference that details the following for each flavor:
Boot sequence.
NVRAM/Open Firmware commands.
Listing of various directory structures, and what they're for (every frickin Unix is different, and IMO, it's the most difficult part of working on a Unix system - figuring out what is where).
Listing of various.conf files, what they're for, where they're located, etc.
- - That's really all. I'm sick of Unix books that concentrate on the standard shell commands and tools we all already know. Give me a reference that tells me how to work on different flavors without going insane!
Slashdot Mirror
I liked the concept behind Birds of Prey - (Batman and Catwoman had a fling, and had a daughter).
But it has to be said: Birds of Prey is an attempt to use the very successful "90210" formula on the geek demographic.
Just like Smallville. Just like Charmed. prolly a half dozen other crappy shows I never watched.
Oddly enough - Buffy is a similar formula, but with gutsier writing, it does not cause intense pain.
ahh, but those under age 24 were not around to experience those first 2 or 3 really GOOD years of MTV when the videos were good, experimental, breaking new ground. And that's all they showed. Of course, after that, MTV became tired, boring, and with the addition of MTV2 and VH1 (et. al.) redundant.
though, if I were the Centre, I would have fired Ms. Parker about 6 seasons ago for gross incompetence. That part always really pissed me off, and this one small thing just made the show completely unwatchable for me.
The only part that was slightly interesting (the hidden crush thing) was overcome with the hokey idea of the gunslinger in space theme that, while interesting, was never taken advantage of, and therefore it lost viewers.
.45 cal. revolvers.
If anything, the "gunslinger" theme, I thought, was the show's weakest point.
For me - it represented a huge forced inconsistency for style's sake. For example, the clothing, the weapons, the furniture, the architecture - all represents a primative technology - and while you could accept that culture might "devolve" to "America old-west" in a post-colonial development and expansion period, which is what this show represents - there's just no damn good reason why the people should wear handmade vintage clothing, eat on old rough-hewn wooden tables, pump water out of the ground with a hand pump, fight with swords or
Do they mean to say that back on earth (or on some backwater planet) there still aren't sweatshops full of illiterate children with non-white skin mass producing clothing and furniture for $2.00 a month? Do they mean to say that there's any significant advantage in a fight-situation to using an antique revolver compared to a plasma pistol with laser sighting?
The concept is nice, but it's over done to the point of illogic, and needs more work. (or at least more thought). In my opinion.
However, I really do like the show, watch it fairly religiously (when my DishPlayer doesn't fuck up) and will miss it.
I agree on John Doe. It's "The Pretender" with at least half a brain. (best part: bad guys who fail to "get" the good guy, are killed for their failures. Fired would even be good enough.) But I assume they'll cancel this one too.
Keep in mind that they cancelled Dark Angel to open up the time slot for Firefly. . .
1. Get marketing data from Tivo or Replay, or Satellite companies who offer Tivo-like systems (Dish), and look on Gnutella et. al. for illegal copies.
2. Find shows which are being watched more often by the "skippers". (and therefore are getting less eyeballs per ad than other shows).
3. Demographically, sci fi fans are geeks, and geeks are more likely to Tivo, Replay, or Gnutella.
therefore -
Sci fi, or any programming which appeals to the Tivo demographic is doomed.
It might be my imagination,but doesn't the $250 price tag [sourceforge.net] strike anyone as being ludicrous???
I mean, looking at pricewatch, a similar 40GB Maxtor HD costs around $70-$80 (give or take, street value)
And supposedly, the 3 disc set of Darwin costs $15 per disc...how does that equate to $250???
no, that's about a typical mark-up from Apple. . .
The SR-71 is a perfect example of where you can simply throw enough money at a problem and solve it.
Mach 3 comes at a tremendous cost - per flight is on the order of millions of dollars. Which is why the SR-71 was retired.
I have no doubt in my mind that TODAY, we could build a plane that would totally blow the SR-71 out of the water - but nobody wants to spend that kind of money operating it.
www.webassociates.com
They crashed Mozilla on my Mac (OS X). The irony is that they're a web hosting and web design company, and their corporate website is evil incarnate.
Read this week's Cringely, and find out why the computer industry desperately needs you to run an extremely resource hungry server as the backend for one of the most important parts of the OS.
in general, planners are only effective if you carry them 100% of the time with you (while you're awake).
For me, the Palm, even the V, is just plain too big.
Something the size of a credit card just might do it for me, but I think there'd have to be a much faster method of input than the Palm's handwriting mechanism.
I used my Palm for a while, but the combination of replacing batteries, and having this extra big device to carry around (on top of my cell phone and pager) was just too much of a PITA.
during the original WTC bombing, one of the companies I heard about had their offsite backups located in a building just across the mall. Since that area was off-limits for several days due to the hazards and the building inspectors checking things out, and the police gathering evidence, they could not access either their primary data OR their backups, so they had all their workers set up at a hot-site, temp offices, phones, equipment - and no data for several days.
Something like 95% of businesses that had no disaster recovery plan failed within a year of the first bombing.
Then after a few system screw ups from running as admin||root on your personal stuff, you train yourself enough to know when you're doing something risky or stupid
yeah, like rm -rf *; oh wait a second, what directory am I in again?
Mafia Don Anthony Geletto said that Local and Federal Police Authorities should work more closely with the Mob.
Wasn't really as good as last year, but the sky was more clear, and on the West coast, the moon was pretty low in the sky by 2:30am.
What I saw were a few average ones, (not a lot of really bright fireballs, many trails, but no trains). And there was an odd pattern to them. We'd see 5-10 of them in the space of about 30 seconds, then nothing, absolutely nothing, for 5-10 minutes, then another little burst. That was pretty much it from 1:45 to 3am, the times I was out. I didn't have time to review my video footage, I assume it's going to suck. I used a Sony DCR-TRV20 with "nightshot" on. Got some good video of my kids oohing and ahhing, but nothing was showing up in the viewfinder at all. I think the key to meteor showers is a wide-angle lens. Or luck.
In my particular situation, as of about two weeks ago, I would have to take a totally mercenary approach. In other words, I'd swallow the money, but I'd hold my nose. For those of us who have house payments, etc. it's the only option.
But now that I have a new job, if my old employer came crawling back now, I would literally laugh at them with the most ridiculous Dr. Evil laugh I can muster. I'm totally serious. My layoff was completely political (well, partially, because she did have to reduce headcount), and was the most harmful choice my manager could have made. For her team, the company, and my family. I have nothing but bitterness. I would only help her if I had no choice.
Bitch and moan all you want about MS breaking apps with each upgrade.
Apple does that too.
Anyone running Jaguar yet?
Even 10.1 broke some things.
7.5 to 8.0 broke a whole buttload of things, IIRC.
And the worst transition was to 9.0. I remember that almost every single shareware app I had broke for 9. I stuck with 8.6 for 2 years because of that.
That's why it's so profitable to be a Mac developer. Your users have to upgrade every 12 months because the OS breaks it.
And no, I'm not talking about the Classic->X upgrade, that's a whole different enchilada. Doesn't count in my book.
okay, so if Alpha particles are electrons, and Beta particles are helium nuclei, and Gamma radiation is photons, then what the hell are all these fast and slow neutrons?
Networking. Not computers. People.
I was recently laid off, and I just got a new job yesterday. Out of the dozens of places I applied at, only one even bothered to send a rejection letter. (plus another one sent a rejection email).
Where did I eventually get a job?
A place where a friend works, and pulled some strings for me - they looked at my resume and created a position for me.
Yes, I realize that I am very, very lucky - but it just goes to show; that if you aren't exactly what someone's already looking for, and if you aren't exactly the strongest candidate, your chances of actually getting a job, whether you have all the skills you need, or whether you're so technically good that you can pick up new skills in a trivially short time, are exactly zero.
This is why I never understood that why someone who would go through all the trouble to weaponize anthrax (the 2001 anthrax mailer) wouldn't also take this simple step to also produce it from an antibiotic-resistant strain. Would this not be a simple matter?:
Mix a batch of 100 petri dishes, put varying quantities of antibiotics into each dish, from 1% to 100%. Harvest surviving bacteria from the strongest concentrations in which it survived. Repeat oh, about 100 times. Then do it again with another antibiotic, until you have some antrhax which nothing will kill. Then weaponize and deliver it.
Sounds simple. I wonder why they didn't do that - it would also make the strain more difficult to trace by DNA analysis, one would think. . .
Yes, I know there are some issues with taking it orally by the 55 gallon drum, I'm not recommending that at all,
That is an incredibly dangerous understatement!
Mostly because there are quacks and charlatans out there trying to sell people orally-adminsterd silver solutions.
the "issues" are: It turns your skin grey. PERMANENTLY. ALL of your skin. It ain't pretty.
The best place to pick up a nasty germ is in the hospital since most patiets there are on antibiotics so the only bugs around are highly resistant to a wide range of drugs.
This is why the Republican "healthcare plan" is so great. By not controlling prices of medical treatments and prescription drugs, they'll just let them spiral upwards until only the ultra-rich can afford to stay in hospitals or take antibiotics, giving the non-antibiotic strains a chance to come back in the general population.
and I have two of those little disease vectors called "children."
While I don't think you mean to blame your children, it's really not their fault.
Last year, my kids were homeschooled, and for that entire year, nobody in my family got sick. Not one cold, not one flu, nothing.
This year, we've had our kids back in public school, and we've already had one stomach flu and one cold work it's way through. In two short months.
In previous years, we've had nastiness like chicken pox, measles, and. . . head lice!! All picked up from other kids at public school.
Why do parents send their sick kids to school so they can infect other kids, and spread diseases to their parents?
I personally blame the public school system for head lice. They could DO something about that. But with most families having BOTH parents working, kids can't take a sick day without making one of the parents take a sick day. So the parents send the kids to school in most cases, unless the kid's physically unable to prop themselves up in their desk. So mainly, I'm blaming the crappy labor standards that discourage parents from taking sick days for their kids. And I'm blaming crappy "modern industrialism" for eroding wages to the point where two adults MUST work in a family in order to maintain an average standard of living.
Homeschooling and having my wife stay at home allowed our family incredible freedom, for vacations, etc. But my getting laid off and taking a job where I now make about 2/3 what I was making, changed that situation.
now if only some enterprising storage device manufacturer would make an actual firewire drive, instead of the typical bastardized IDE-with-a-Firewire-bridge crap they've been selling. . .
For me - what I think I need MOST, is a reference for the various unixes. A reference that details the following for each flavor:
.conf files, what they're for, where they're located, etc.
Boot sequence.
NVRAM/Open Firmware commands.
Listing of various directory structures, and what they're for (every frickin Unix is different, and IMO, it's the most difficult part of working on a Unix system - figuring out what is where).
Listing of various
- -
That's really all. I'm sick of Unix books that concentrate on the standard shell commands and tools we all already know. Give me a reference that tells me how to work on different flavors without going insane!
Since Java's library runtimes are compressed using the pkzip alg. - or has that changed in the past 3 years?