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User: SupahVee

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  1. Ren & Stimpy on Interviews: Ask SMBC's Creator Zach Weiner a Question · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I see a fair bit of other influences in your comics, with Ren & Stimpy references seeming to show up here and there. What other comic have played a role in your work, and is there some bad experience in early childhood that clearly left you so scarred from Ren & Stimpy?

  2. Re:Gentoo works for me on Greg KH Favors Rolling Release Distros · · Score: 1

    I've alo been using gentoo on my desktops for about the same amount of time, it's by far my favorite of all that I've tried. And while the ricer-level make options don't have as much effect on performance as they used to, I still like the configurability of the whole thing.

    That being said, I wouldn't run Gentoo is a prod environment for any amount of money, it's debian or a redhat-based distro, all the way. The nuances of the portage tree from week to week just lend themselves to too much instability on what might get installed when you're trying to pull in an update.

    Things like "Oops, we green-lit perl-5.16 when it should've been 5.18", and all your modules are broken and perpetually rebuilding for the next week, or "We migrated everyone from grub to grub2 and renamed the original grub to 'grub-static' and didn't tell anyone, sorry about any systems that don't boot"

    I like to tinker on my desktops, I have zero desire to do so with production systems.

  3. priorities on Bruce Perens Voted off SPI Board · · Score: 1

    A while back, a former boss and I were talking, about moving to new jobs, etc. Came across a cool quote that day:

    "No one ever got to the end of their life and looked around and said 'I wish I had spent more time working'"

    You go Bruce.

  4. Note to Wally world on Wal-Mart Trying to Trademark the Smiley Face · · Score: 3, Informative

    Plastic Legos began production in 1963, they've had smiley faces on them ever since, Duplo's were introduced in 1967, they have smileys.

    Suck it.

  5. missing the point on Has World Oil Production Passed Its Peak? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What everyone so far seems to have missed is not "what are we gonna use to drive our cars back and forth to work with?!" but, "How the hell are we gonna feed ourselves?"

    Oil is food, people. Don't think so? imagine the lines of connection going back from your local mega-mart - very little food is grown locally anymore, it all gets shipped in, and we, as faithful 'consumers' consume what's presented to us. Wanna move closer to a farm? Nice try, that wont work either, most food cannot be grown or survive without the very extensive use of, you guessed it, petroleum based pesticides.

    Oh, well we can switch to a hydrogen based economy! Wrong again, can't make hydrogen without oil. Can't make fancy electric cars without a current reserve of oil.

    Get a bike, get spare parts, and start riding, it's gonna be a long 75-150 years, everyone.

  6. 3-4% really is the norm on Are Skimpy Raises the New Normal? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    And while I may whine about the fact that most of the time I have to jump jobs to get a raise, if I hung around those places, i'd probably be likely to get the 3-4% every year or so, and I don't really have a problem with that.

    What I do have a problem with is when I only get a 3-4% raise, yet, executives can give themselves 50% raises, 4 million dollar bonuses, etc. There is nothing a CEO can produce that warrants that level of compensation. PERIOD.

    I say we find somebody crazy enough in congress to propose a salary cap for CEO's bill. Then tell everyone in the public about it, and see how many people really support something like that. Especially when the workers outnumber the C-level's probably 100 to 1.

  7. how about just efficient cars to begin with? on When Hybrids Do (And Don't) Make Sense · · Score: 1

    Currently, I drive a 5 year old saturn SL1, teeny tiny (by today's standards) 4 banger, 1.9L. yet, I can squeeze 33-36 mpg out of it for city driving, and on the highway, barring mountains and such, this has topped out at 42-46 mpg. Yet, I can wander into a saturn dealership right now, and I can't find a single vehicle rated over 22/28 city/highway. Why've discontinued the smaller engines in favor of bigger, less efficient ones, and they arent the only ones to do this. Every SINGLE mfr, has gradually reduced the overall mileage of their vehicles. At present we've come nearly 30 years down the technology timeline, and we get the same mileage that cars did in 1976?! Seriously, one of my first cars was a 1975 full size Pontiac with a 455cid engine in it, and it got better mileage than nearly all full size cars on the market do now, and DEFINITELY better mileage than EVERY SUV offered today. know what I got on that bugger? 13mpg, on a good day, 22 on the highway. Sad.

    I'm kinda due for a new car, but when I started shopping around, I found a few cars that were appealing, but none got the mileage that my current one does, and honestly, I refuse to buy a Prius and give Toyota money, just so they can dump the profits from my purchase back into making more Tundra's and Sequoia's. Honda is even partially guilty of this, and they are mostly quite good when it comes to fuel efficiency. Did you know the accord hybrid gets the same mileage as the regular ICE one? Oh, the hybrid just has more power for getting off the line, great use of technology, boys.

    Hybrid's are not the point, using less gas doesnt count, using NO gas should be the goal. damn, my altruistic views again.

  8. Those of us on Extra Daylight Savings May Confuse the Gadgets · · Score: 1

    In arizona, laugh at the rest of the country, twice a year, now we just have to do it a bit later and earlier than usual.

  9. Just goes to show on Mac OS X Gaining Ground In Corporate Environs · · Score: 1

    That it doesnt matter who's the best, or the worst, but as long corporations feel that they have someone to blame when something goes wrong.

    They want an alternative, but when one stares them in the face, they still choose something that while nice, (and yes, I lust for a 15" powerbook, too) will require you to repurchase every single bit of functional software you have, to make it useful. And most of the things that someone would use a mac for, are not cheap applications, photoshop, office, illustrator, etc. easily another grand invested in software for an already way expensive platform.

    But it still comes down to having someone to blame. Same reason just about every linux distro is pretty much created equal (insert flame war here) save for the package mgt tools, what do most companies that want to 'get on this linux thing' end up doing? Buying RedHat, every single time. Why? because if something goes wrong, they've got someone to sue.

  10. only seems fitting on Longhorn Drops 'My' Prefixes · · Score: 1

    since it's only a matter of time until Microsoft owns your computer with Longhorn anyways. It won't be 'My Computer", and putting "Bill and Steve's Bitch" seemed a bit too offensive.

  11. useful features on Hacking the iPod Firmware · · Score: 0, Troll

    Instead of making cosmetic changes like this, if someone out there is clever enough to get into the firmware of the iPod, add some useful features, perhaps the holy grail of the iPod, in my opinion. Ogg support. T
    he fact that Apple can embrace BSD for their core, and have things interoperate rather well, yet leave this part out, when numerous listening tests have shown that Ogg Vorbis has better sound quality as equivalent bitrates than ANY lossy compression scheme, is just plain annoying, and is the single reason I havent bought an iPod. My whole music collection is ripped in .ogg, and to have to convert it because Apple is stubborn is not my idea of a good time.

  12. Just do what I do on Curse Your Way to Live Support · · Score: 4, Informative

    When you get into a VRU system, keep in mind that a human HAD to set the thing up, and always left a way for themselves to speak with a rep if needed (i.e. testing). So, when you get in, start pushing buttons, a lot of them, especially the * and #, as those will frequently be used for escape sequences. The default action for a majority of systems that do this is to immediately route you to an operator, an operator who has internal extensions. THen just act like you got a bit lost during the 4,3,6,1,8,9.... and ask politely for whatever dept you're trying to get, and ask for an extension in case you have to call back. Works roughly 85% of the time for me. :-D

  13. balls that clank. on Photoshop Fails At Counterfeit Prevention · · Score: 1

    you gotta hand it to Adobe, they really do have balls of wroght iron for saying something like this:

    'As a market leader and a good corporate citizen....'

    So, Mr. Connor, how is Dmitry these days?

  14. Re:What's more important? on 235,000 Fewer Programmers by 2015 · · Score: 1

    I'm in Wyoming. some say that state motto is "Where the men are men, and the sheep are scared."

    I just see inefficiency here everywhere. This is the windiest state in the union, by a long shot, average recorded wind speed for some parts of the state is over 25 knots. KNOTS!
    Give you 3 guesses what we DON'T have here though? Wind turbines.
    Tantamount to not using solar power in Arizona.
    Morons.

  15. pgp on Evolution 1.5 has Been Released · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The real question I have for the developers is this: when will we ever see decent PGP/GPG support for Evolution? It's hand-down the most feature complete email app available for GNU/Linux, and yet, still can't do PGP even half as good as Pine, Kmail, Enigmail. The only time I get a PGP'ed email that I can read is ONLY if it was sent by another evolution client, which sounds more like the behavior I would expect from LookOut. Hell, the only way I've gotten decent GPG support for Evo is to have Pine reading a folder where I filter encrypted messages into, Pine reads them just fine, Evolution can't. I've looked through all the features that will supposedly be in the 2.0 release, and nowhere is there mentioned any fix of the PGP handling. I don't pretend to know more than the developers, and I'm sure there may be reasons why they've chosen to leave this feature broken, but if every other OSS Email project can nail it, why can't they?

  16. Bad, and good at the same time on Transcriber Threatens Release of Medical Records · · Score: 2, Insightful

    No doubt this is a 'bad thing' since medical record confidentiality is a widely accepted thing in our society. But having known several people who have worked for large hospitals, medical offices, and such, this is simply payback for thos ehospitals who clear millions of dollars in profits AFTER they've already payed everyone in the building.

    Business will always be business, and every manager wants a fatter check for gettings things done cheaply, but they simply got what they paid for. They wanted it cheap, now they got the quality that comes with that.

    Pay your employees, people! Create some value in your business by doing it yourself. I'm not saying that a medical transcriptionist should be making 75K/yr, but the money they saved by offshoring this, they just lost 10 times over in the lawsuits that will be flowing into that hospital now for violating doctor-patient confiditiality.

    A middle manager/upper manager should be fired, publicly, for this.

  17. What I "Learned" from being out of work on The Surprising Benefits of Being Unemployed · · Score: 5, Interesting

    1 - That while average Joe Worker makes 66% more salaray than he did in 1980, Joe CEO is making 1996% more than _he_ did in 1980.

    2 - that having to sell your house after 8 months of being unemployed, SUCKS, worse than anything you can imagine.

    3 - That moving a thousand miles away from a place you consider home for a job fixing Windows boxen is about as fun as it sounds.

    4 - That companies do job postings with no intention of filling them.

    5 - That of all the oddball things that helped while having a mortgage, a newborn and no job, Wife's Unionized insurance plan is at the top of the list.

    6 - that I can now be lazy at work, and get fired, or bust my ass at work, and get fired.

    7 - that startng over is as shitty as you think it is.

  18. Re:Grrrrr..... on U.S. Court Blocks Anti-Telemarketing List · · Score: 1

    Lookout! TORNADO!!! Ok, that was a bit below the belt for someone living in Oklahoma. Sorry.

  19. Sad to see it go on Microsoft Pulls Plug for Support on NT4 · · Score: 1

    I'll be the first to admit, I'm a die-hard OSS evangelist, if it's Linux, BSD, etc, I'm going to endorse it. But I will even concede that NT4 was a very stable, fast, and reasonable secure product, out of the box. It was when everything got added to it, IE, SP1,2,3,4,5, Office, etc. that it became as unstable as the rest of their OS's. Plus, it was the last one they produced to have decent non-intel support. I remember even having a couple NT4 servers that I supported a few years back that had uptimes in the 6-9 month range, as well. Even at my current place of employment, we've got several hundred (1200+) NT4 boxes still in production. Why? They just work, and since they do very specialized things on an isloated network, we havent even had to add security patches in years. Go Figure.

  20. wait a sec on Zynot Foundation Forks Gentoo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Isn't the very thing that he's complaining about, that the main Gentoo project was taking 'his stuff' and without compensating him for it, The very same thing that he has just done to Gentoo?
    i.e. Yes, he may have donated several machines to the project, and some specific coding related tot eh ARM branch, but what about the parts that really make gentoo what it is, like, say portage, the boatloads of prepatched kernels for things like grsecurity, selinux, vanilla, etc. I could check again, but I don't remember seeing his name anywhere.
    Seems to me it went like this:
    -drobbins- Wanna help?
    -zach- sure, but I want financial compensation for everything I do
    -drobbins- Well, this gentoo thing makes money, but let's face it, it's a linux distro, and it's not a whole lot of money.
    -zach- *GASP*! Fine, I'm taking all my stuff and forking your distro!

    Am I missing anything? (flame away)

  21. Renaissance man. on Is the Seeking of Lost Skills/Arts a Hacking Analog? · · Score: 1
    I don't think that it is very unique to your situation, as I find myself trying all sorts of new things that don't relate to traditional hacking. my current passion being cooking, not just making food for myself for sustinence, but getting in the kitchen for about 4-6 hours, and making 6 course meals. Even though the only person in the house is my wife and son. Gardening is also quite fun these days, and my wife has discovered the art of making bread, all sorts of bread, sheepherder bread, sourdough, everything.


    This may be different for other people, but my wife and I both agree that we want to do this for several reasons, the biggest one being that we have a child now, and entrusting him with the control of the microwave and television just isn't what I want to pass on to him. And I personally think the world is going to hell on a fast train, and in the next 40 years, we could see the downfall of the American society as we know it. I know it sounds a bit catastrophic, but it will happen, maybe soon, maybe not in my lifetime. And things like the skills that people seem to people striving for these days will be very valuable. Plus, it sure is damn cheap to grow and make your own food, rather than shopping all the time.


    Then again, people could just be discovering the joy of creating something from nothing, kinda like hacking. :-)

  22. It's a dupe. on More on OpenBSD Funding Saga · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    But at least it wasnt Taco this time. Michael must be bucking for a promotion...

  23. *AHEM* on What's Your Favorite Underappreciated Movie? · · Score: 1

    Army Of Darkness. End of Story.

    "Hey, wait a minute! I never even SAW these assholes!"

  24. Re:How about.... on Ask Kevin Mitnick · · Score: 2, Funny

    Probably flamebait, but, if it were me, the goat pr0n of Shimomura would be first on my list. Spamming usenet with that would be worth the wait.

  25. Re:Seat of Trust is infinite regression on AMI Introduces 'Trusted Computing' BIOS · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Also, conceptually, this will still not solve the trust issue, as someone could still open up their case and replace their BIOS chip.

    Ever tried to replace a BIOS that is soldered directly to the board? if so, please let me know how it went. :-)