I too have a very common firstnamelastname@gmail.com. For personal emails, I just reply and let them know they've got the wrong falloutboy. One guy, a screenwriter in LA, gave my address to a lot of his family, so I had to have kind of an awkward exchange with his mother and one of his aunts who CONTINUES to send me photos of her young son. This is weird stuff I don't want in my inbox.
For the DirecTV emails, I submitted like 15 messages to their general customer service inquiry form. That took like four months to get completely cleared up.
Once I got looped in on an email thread where the other three people were high school kids using Facebook, so my only method for actually communicating was that I had to add as a friend a high school girl. I'm a 30 year old man. My wife was less than thrilled.
Somewhere in the Windows Vista control panel garbage is a setting for cranking up the size of fonts which includes buttons and dialogue boxes and stuff. I did this on my 40" LCD at home running in whatever-by-1080 resolution so that I can read text from the couch with a wireless keyboard and mouse. It works mostly okay, but because software apps don't scale up with the increased font size, you end up with some really strange looking dialogue boxes and some other unexpected behavior.
The fancy buttons on the top of the Chrome browser window, for example, don't respond to clicking at all. Obviously they're expecting a click at some location on the screen and Windows is drawing the buttons in a totally different place. Its okay if you know keyboard shortcuts (like windows key + m to minimize), but still annoying. Would drive me nuts if it was my work PC.
I only see two posts on this site in total. According to his "about me" page,
Over the last few years, I've been pursuing graphic design consultancy opportunities at independent design and development firms, while still maintaining a keen - although not public - interest in Microsoft beta products. I'm now focussing primarily on Windows 7 as the Vista development seems to have played out as far as it's likely to.
So is he writing based on some information coming from inside MS? Is he taking educated guesses? Why does this guy rate a slashdot story?
In any case, he makes some interesting points. As a dissatisfied Vista user and the owner of an iBook G4, I'm gradually making my way into a Mac-only world at home. In my wildest dreams -- and this will tell you how lame my dreams are -- I hope that Microsoft will use the same BSD core as Mac OS and build a different GUI, as Apple has done. It would unify commercial application development to some degree, which would be pretty cool. I admit, I don't have any idea if the relevent licenses allow for it.
On an unrelated note, I'm still kind of irked that I can't get Quake 4 to run on the Vista box. $1700 and pretty much all I do with it is email and web browsing. I have a firewire card, but doing video on the iBook is so easy I can't even be bothered to install the card.
I live in Brooklyn and currently have Time Warner cable modem service (although not cable tv -- Dish Network for that). The speed I get is usually pretty good, although streaming video is frequently jittery, even during far off-peak hours. Unfortunately the only other consumer-class services that is available to my apartment is Earthlink cable modem, 5 megabit down. I'm pretty sure I'm going to switch to that soon, largely because Time Warner customer support sucks so badly. After Earthlink, though, I'm pretty much out of options. Doh.
I'm 26 and I'm already losing significant amounts of hair on the top and espeically the crown of my head. It'll probably be completely gone by the time I'm 30, if it takes that long. You think its no big deal? Try shaving just that part of your head for a few weeks and see how it feels. Keep me posted.
Many point of sale systems are designed with dumb terminals in mind. The major player in this segment is a company called Micros, and most of the new systems sold through their dealers are Win CE-based client terminals that boot from an image located on a Windows server on the LAN. Another manufacturer, Aloha, has a similar setup, instead using something called WEPOS ("Windows Embedded for Point of Service).
For maintenance, these things rock. Terminals are all interchangable, so if one fails you can roll in a new one from another part of your restaurant (or retail clothing store, etc) without needing to know anything other than where to plug in the wires. Very handy.
These systems are very common in retail environments, and are relatively pleasant to work with.
1. Wash the CD with hand soap and water 2. Dry it off 3. Put a little chapstick on the tip of your finger, rub it gently in a circular motion on the surface of the CD where the scratch is 4. Wash again with hand soap and water
This seemed to work pretty well for small scratches.
You're not wrong about DXM, but I'm sure the no-buying-in-quantity thing is related to the psuedoephedrine in the cough syrup. In New York you can't buy more than three items of anything with it. So the last time I had a head cold, I bought a bottle of nyquil, a bottle of dayquil, and only one box of sudafed.
And, in order to stay on-topic...
In high school I had pretty bad allergies, so I'd take sudafed often in the spring (damn you, hayfever). By my senior year I had noticed that it was a lot easier for me to maintain razor sharp focus when I was on the stuff, so I'd sometimes take it when I needed to study or a few minutes before an exam. I never took more than the recommended dose, and often I took less. I'm not all that concerned about long-term health problems, but its something I'll probably ask my doctor about the next time I'm there.
Bloomberg was a registered Democrat for many years, up until about 8 months before the general election. Running as a Republican meant he didn't have to run in a primary, and since the Republicans knew they would never win with anyone else, he was pretty much free to write his own ticket. Which he did, and thats why he comes off as a fiscally conservative progressive democrat who occasionally is required to support the Republican party.
"1992 - ThinkPad 700C IBM launched the first edition of its ThinkPad series, the ThinkPad 700C. Right from the start IBM set the standard: the first notebook with a 10.4" color TFT screen and a new TrackPoint pointing device. This notebook weighed 5.7 lb And had a memory of 120 MB--respectable for the era. "
"Annoyingly, ZipCar tends to charge my credit card for the tolls I incurred weeks after the reservation. Why does it take so long? Doesn't EZPass give them some kind of realtime account? They must have a hundred EZPass tags in this area."
...which is to say the tolls I incurred when I had the car are billed a few weeks later. Shoulda used the preview button.:P
I've been using ZipCar for about a year for business. The cars nearest me are parked at a private indoor lot only a few blocks from my apartment, so I never had to brush snow or ice in the winter, which is nice.
Annoyingly, ZipCar tends to charge my credit card for the tolls I incurred weeks after the reservation. Why does it take so long? Doesn't EZPass give them some kind of realtime account? They must have a hundred EZPass tags in this area.
The cars tend to be quite clean. I've never gotten into one and found pet hair or smelled cigarette smoke or anything like that. I once found a few unused napkins in the cupholder, but who cares?
The only real gripe I have with ZipCar is that the card is a little unpredicable when I try to open the cars. Waving it past the sensor doesn't really work. I have to slap it right against the windshield over the sensor, and if the card is even a little bent, it won't work at all. On one of the cars I rented it would only trigger the locks if I tapped the card against the windshield at a 90 degree angle. (Any radio nerds want to explain that to me?)
I would say, from the manager's perspective, it was prudent to call the police and let them know what was going on. I don't think it was necessary to call 911, though. In NYC there is another number, 311, that is a general information line for all things New York. The 311 operators would have definitely connected the call to a local police station without going through an emergency line.
Somewhat off-topic: I once called 311 because I found my previously stolen bike chained to a subway stop in front of a Chinese restaurant. They ended up connecting me to 911 anyway, but was it really an emergency? I don't think so.
Under title 47 of the Code of Federal Regulations it is illegal for telemarketers to spoof caller ID, so don't sweat it. If you want to read the section of law, google for "47 CFR 64.1600" and feel free to use the "I'm feeling lucky" button.
I hate Microsoft as much of the next guy, but I don't see what's wrong with this. It's basically saying "If you lost data, you can sue. If you didn't, you can't".
Actually, anyone can sue anyone for anything. In order to be awarded damages (uh, you know -- money) you have to prove that you were damaged, and then you have place a value on the damage that occured. If you didn't lose any data, your damage was zero, and suing would just be an expensive way to make a point.
This isn't really a story; its just a bunch of blurbs about show plots with actually no commentary whatsoever. I clicked through fifty pages of that nonsense hoping to find some meat to it, but I hath been led down a path of ad impressions and wasted time. From now on I'm boycotting all thigns Boston, except when the Sox play the Yankees, and then only to root for the Yankees. Thats right Boston.com, I said go Yankees.
On a slightly more relevent note, I just marathoned like seven episodes of the new Battlestar Galactica on my DVR, and I think it might actually be the best show on TV, including those edgy shows on cable where they show boobies. Its that good.
Over the last few years I've read some comments on slashdot about schools teaching linux, and I've just now had an idea that I think might be practical.
I remember in elementary school, once a week or so my class would be herded into the computer lab to learn how to use a word processor and spreadsheet app on the school's Apple IIe computers. I spent a lot more time playing Oregon Trail and playing around with BASIC on those computers, but I definitely learned the underlying concepts about using a word processor or spreadsheet, and was able to really easily transition to Wordstar 5 for DOS and later other apps.
It wasn't so much about typing a letter to the editor or whatever we were doing back then, as it was about being comfortable accomplishing a certain set of steps with a computer.
I wonder, then, if you had 30 third grade students in a computer lab, 10 using Windows, 10 using Mac OS, and 10 using Linux (perhaps Red Hat? whatever is dominating is probably wisest), could you ask them all to accomplish essentially the same task? Of course, I mean that they should rotate to each machine, although not necessarily during a single class session, and be exposed to all the machines.
Any teachers out there? Does this idea make any sense?
I recently starting commuting to Manhattan, and like many straphangers*, I want to listen to anything but the preachers and beggers on the subway. I was about to buy an iPod mini, but when I saw how much the Archos Gmini 400 does, I was blown away. I'm a photographer, so I have a bunch of high capacity compact flash cards lying around that I could actually use with the Gmini, which has a CF reader.
* Straphanger: slang for a subway rider. NYC subways used to have leather straps that riders could "hang" from in order to not fall when the car started moving. They've all been replaced by metal bars.
I'm pretty thrilled with plugins for Firefox and the potential that exists there. As web applications grow in popularity, I'm hoping that software vendors will offer Firefox plugins alongside or instead of ActiveX components.
Will this incite editing wars on controversial topics? The open nature of wikipedia is great because historical events have already been scrutinized and understood. Distance lends perspective. Current events are much more subject to an author's personal bias, and the individuals most motivated to put their opinion out there often have the most radical viewpoint.
With games like Halo 2 grosing $100 mil on the first day, for a much smaller budget compared to Alexander, the bottom line is clear. The age of movies is waning.
How do you figure? The two are different kinds of entertainment. Movies are passive, video games are active, and while there's lots of overlap in people who enjoy them, some people don't care for one or the other.
Slashdot Mirror
I too have a very common firstnamelastname@gmail.com. For personal emails, I just reply and let them know they've got the wrong falloutboy. One guy, a screenwriter in LA, gave my address to a lot of his family, so I had to have kind of an awkward exchange with his mother and one of his aunts who CONTINUES to send me photos of her young son. This is weird stuff I don't want in my inbox.
For the DirecTV emails, I submitted like 15 messages to their general customer service inquiry form. That took like four months to get completely cleared up.
Once I got looped in on an email thread where the other three people were high school kids using Facebook, so my only method for actually communicating was that I had to add as a friend a high school girl. I'm a 30 year old man. My wife was less than thrilled.
Somewhere in the Windows Vista control panel garbage is a setting for cranking up the size of fonts which includes buttons and dialogue boxes and stuff. I did this on my 40" LCD at home running in whatever-by-1080 resolution so that I can read text from the couch with a wireless keyboard and mouse. It works mostly okay, but because software apps don't scale up with the increased font size, you end up with some really strange looking dialogue boxes and some other unexpected behavior.
The fancy buttons on the top of the Chrome browser window, for example, don't respond to clicking at all. Obviously they're expecting a click at some location on the screen and Windows is drawing the buttons in a totally different place. Its okay if you know keyboard shortcuts (like windows key + m to minimize), but still annoying. Would drive me nuts if it was my work PC.
I only see two posts on this site in total. According to his "about me" page,
So is he writing based on some information coming from inside MS? Is he taking educated guesses? Why does this guy rate a slashdot story?
In any case, he makes some interesting points. As a dissatisfied Vista user and the owner of an iBook G4, I'm gradually making my way into a Mac-only world at home. In my wildest dreams -- and this will tell you how lame my dreams are -- I hope that Microsoft will use the same BSD core as Mac OS and build a different GUI, as Apple has done. It would unify commercial application development to some degree, which would be pretty cool. I admit, I don't have any idea if the relevent licenses allow for it.
On an unrelated note, I'm still kind of irked that I can't get Quake 4 to run on the Vista box. $1700 and pretty much all I do with it is email and web browsing. I have a firewire card, but doing video on the iBook is so easy I can't even be bothered to install the card.
I live in Brooklyn and currently have Time Warner cable modem service (although not cable tv -- Dish Network for that). The speed I get is usually pretty good, although streaming video is frequently jittery, even during far off-peak hours. Unfortunately the only other consumer-class services that is available to my apartment is Earthlink cable modem, 5 megabit down. I'm pretty sure I'm going to switch to that soon, largely because Time Warner customer support sucks so badly. After Earthlink, though, I'm pretty much out of options. Doh.
I'm 26 and I'm already losing significant amounts of hair on the top and espeically the crown of my head. It'll probably be completely gone by the time I'm 30, if it takes that long. You think its no big deal? Try shaving just that part of your head for a few weeks and see how it feels. Keep me posted.
Many point of sale systems are designed with dumb terminals in mind. The major player in this segment is a company called Micros, and most of the new systems sold through their dealers are Win CE-based client terminals that boot from an image located on a Windows server on the LAN. Another manufacturer, Aloha, has a similar setup, instead using something called WEPOS ("Windows Embedded for Point of Service).
For maintenance, these things rock. Terminals are all interchangable, so if one fails you can roll in a new one from another part of your restaurant (or retail clothing store, etc) without needing to know anything other than where to plug in the wires. Very handy.
These systems are very common in retail environments, and are relatively pleasant to work with.
1. Wash the CD with hand soap and water
2. Dry it off
3. Put a little chapstick on the tip of your finger, rub it gently in a circular motion on the surface of the CD where the scratch is
4. Wash again with hand soap and water
This seemed to work pretty well for small scratches.
You're not wrong about DXM, but I'm sure the no-buying-in-quantity thing is related to the psuedoephedrine in the cough syrup. In New York you can't buy more than three items of anything with it. So the last time I had a head cold, I bought a bottle of nyquil, a bottle of dayquil, and only one box of sudafed.
And, in order to stay on-topic...
In high school I had pretty bad allergies, so I'd take sudafed often in the spring (damn you, hayfever). By my senior year I had noticed that it was a lot easier for me to maintain razor sharp focus when I was on the stuff, so I'd sometimes take it when I needed to study or a few minutes before an exam. I never took more than the recommended dose, and often I took less. I'm not all that concerned about long-term health problems, but its something I'll probably ask my doctor about the next time I'm there.
Bloomberg was a registered Democrat for many years, up until about 8 months before the general election. Running as a Republican meant he didn't have to run in a primary, and since the Republicans knew they would never win with anyone else, he was pretty much free to write his own ticket. Which he did, and thats why he comes off as a fiscally conservative progressive democrat who occasionally is required to support the Republican party.
Ahem.
t ory.html#1992
"1992 - ThinkPad 700C
IBM launched the first edition of its ThinkPad series, the ThinkPad 700C. Right from the start IBM set the standard: the first notebook with a 10.4" color TFT screen and a new TrackPoint pointing device. This notebook weighed 5.7 lb And had a memory of 120 MB--respectable for the era. "
http://www.pc.ibm.com/us/thinkpad/anniversary/his
And the color of the case? Darth vader black.
"Annoyingly, ZipCar tends to charge my credit card for the tolls I incurred weeks after the reservation. Why does it take so long? Doesn't EZPass give them some kind of realtime account? They must have a hundred EZPass tags in this area."
...which is to say the tolls I incurred when I had the car are billed a few weeks later. Shoulda used the preview button. :P
I've been using ZipCar for about a year for business. The cars nearest me are parked at a private indoor lot only a few blocks from my apartment, so I never had to brush snow or ice in the winter, which is nice.
Annoyingly, ZipCar tends to charge my credit card for the tolls I incurred weeks after the reservation. Why does it take so long? Doesn't EZPass give them some kind of realtime account? They must have a hundred EZPass tags in this area.
The cars tend to be quite clean. I've never gotten into one and found pet hair or smelled cigarette smoke or anything like that. I once found a few unused napkins in the cupholder, but who cares?
The only real gripe I have with ZipCar is that the card is a little unpredicable when I try to open the cars. Waving it past the sensor doesn't really work. I have to slap it right against the windshield over the sensor, and if the card is even a little bent, it won't work at all. On one of the cars I rented it would only trigger the locks if I tapped the card against the windshield at a 90 degree angle. (Any radio nerds want to explain that to me?)
I would say, from the manager's perspective, it was prudent to call the police and let them know what was going on. I don't think it was necessary to call 911, though. In NYC there is another number, 311, that is a general information line for all things New York. The 311 operators would have definitely connected the call to a local police station without going through an emergency line.
Somewhat off-topic: I once called 311 because I found my previously stolen bike chained to a subway stop in front of a Chinese restaurant. They ended up connecting me to 911 anyway, but was it really an emergency? I don't think so.
Under title 47 of the Code of Federal Regulations it is illegal for telemarketers to spoof caller ID, so don't sweat it. If you want to read the section of law, google for "47 CFR 64.1600" and feel free to use the "I'm feeling lucky" button.
Actually, anyone can sue anyone for anything. In order to be awarded damages (uh, you know -- money) you have to prove that you were damaged, and then you have place a value on the damage that occured. If you didn't lose any data, your damage was zero, and suing would just be an expensive way to make a point.
This isn't really a story; its just a bunch of blurbs about show plots with actually no commentary whatsoever. I clicked through fifty pages of that nonsense hoping to find some meat to it, but I hath been led down a path of ad impressions and wasted time. From now on I'm boycotting all thigns Boston, except when the Sox play the Yankees, and then only to root for the Yankees. Thats right Boston.com, I said go Yankees.
On a slightly more relevent note, I just marathoned like seven episodes of the new Battlestar Galactica on my DVR, and I think it might actually be the best show on TV, including those edgy shows on cable where they show boobies. Its that good.
Over the last few years I've read some comments on slashdot about schools teaching linux, and I've just now had an idea that I think might be practical.
I remember in elementary school, once a week or so my class would be herded into the computer lab to learn how to use a word processor and spreadsheet app on the school's Apple IIe computers. I spent a lot more time playing Oregon Trail and playing around with BASIC on those computers, but I definitely learned the underlying concepts about using a word processor or spreadsheet, and was able to really easily transition to Wordstar 5 for DOS and later other apps.
It wasn't so much about typing a letter to the editor or whatever we were doing back then, as it was about being comfortable accomplishing a certain set of steps with a computer.
I wonder, then, if you had 30 third grade students in a computer lab, 10 using Windows, 10 using Mac OS, and 10 using Linux (perhaps Red Hat? whatever is dominating is probably wisest), could you ask them all to accomplish essentially the same task? Of course, I mean that they should rotate to each machine, although not necessarily during a single class session, and be exposed to all the machines.
Any teachers out there? Does this idea make any sense?
This story is a great reason not to get a subscription to slashdot.
Anyway, the video -- which is funny -- is several years old and comes from http://www.ubergeek.tv/
I recently starting commuting to Manhattan, and like many straphangers*, I want to listen to anything but the preachers and beggers on the subway. I was about to buy an iPod mini, but when I saw how much the Archos Gmini 400 does, I was blown away. I'm a photographer, so I have a bunch of high capacity compact flash cards lying around that I could actually use with the Gmini, which has a CF reader.
Archos Gmini review: http://www.tomshardware.com/mobile/20041021/
* Straphanger: slang for a subway rider. NYC subways used to have leather straps that riders could "hang" from in order to not fall when the car started moving. They've all been replaced by metal bars.
I'm pretty thrilled with plugins for Firefox and the potential that exists there. As web applications grow in popularity, I'm hoping that software vendors will offer Firefox plugins alongside or instead of ActiveX components.
Will this incite editing wars on controversial topics? The open nature of wikipedia is great because historical events have already been scrutinized and understood. Distance lends perspective. Current events are much more subject to an author's personal bias, and the individuals most motivated to put their opinion out there often have the most radical viewpoint.
How do you figure? The two are different kinds of entertainment. Movies are passive, video games are active, and while there's lots of overlap in people who enjoy them, some people don't care for one or the other.
I'll try again later, but if I see even a paragraph on who shot who at the cantina, I'm going to fall on my lightsaber.
With a gig of memory and a 128 meg geforce 4 Ti 4200, I run it at 800x600 with medium quality settings. Its chunky. Mouse works fine, though.
I have a Samsung SyncMaster 770, P4 2.26 ghz, Logitech USB mouse. I am teh k1ng of Doom 3!!!!!1!11