We have a similar corporate policy, and it's frustrating as hell. I keep emails from the analysts that have important notes regarding projects, and they get auto-deleted after 30 days. It's really tough to work under such stupid conditions.
I hope this SOX-enforced change comes quickly -- then I can quit violating company policy ( because I'm auto-saving everything with a home-built scraper:-)
Broadband in Gas looks pretty damn clever. Except it doesn't solve the BPL problem at all. Very few rural areas that don't already have broadband cable are served by natural gas pipelines. Virtually all the homes and businesses in the outlying areas of Minnesota, for example, are fueled by LP gas, which is typically delivered in trucks, not pipes.
And that's not counting the far southern states, where even metropolitan customers typically have no need for residential gas service at all. Electricity or LP makes up their supplemental heat energy needs.
BiG looks like it will be at most a competitor to traditional cable operators. Don't get me wrong, it's a good thing and I'd love to cut my Comcast bill in half due to some serious competition (around here DSL is about a fifth of the speed of residential broadband service for about 75% of the cost.) But it won't solve any BPL problems we don't already face.
The grandparent poster has a valid point. Just because you think you have a solution (a ridiculously expensive one) doesn't mean you have the only solution.
Sure, the invention of cat-5 was a work of pure genius. But that doesn't mean every unshielded wire carrying a signal needs to be cat-5 to eliminate interference. For example, look at DSL and ADSL. They're running at speeds far faster than cat-3 was ever designed to run. (And while I don't know how much the interference affects either DSL or competing portions of the spectrum, I know it's certainly not as contentious as BPL.)
Maybe the answer to BPL is a different piece of the spectrum, say something way out there like 7GHz. Buy a few companies a few new satellites to replace the ones suffering from the new interference, and you're golden. Or maybe a lower power signal, with more repeaters. Or maybe some other solution that no genius has come up with yet.
The only thing we know for sure is: BPL in its current incarnation is crap. How stinky the crap is is still up for debate.
I think the grandparent was trying to say that "local control" in an intelligent grid would be self-limiting. No grid would try to take on more load than its rating would allow. The neighboring grids would see the "blackout" next door, and check their current capacity. If they were running at 85%, they could offer to carry a share of the load. Decentralized, intelligent control.
Or so the theory goes to a layman such as myself. IANAEE.
HP has been the poster child for how to install crap the wrong way in Windows.
Set the wayback machine for the late 1990s. I bought a fast, expensive HP inkjet. When I got my brand new printer home and tried to "install" it, the "installer" wanted me to run their stuff. Having had prior experience with HP crapware, I said "no thanks, I'll install it myself." So I clicked up the add hardware lizard, and said "I'll for search myself, and I have a disk, thank you." When I selected the correct HP driver, only a dialog box appeared, informing me "ERROR: You must run SETUP.EXE from this disk in order to install the printer driver."
Yes, I'm sure I could have un-cabbed whatever real driver files there were, made dozens of appropriately arcane registry entries by hand, and had a mostly unstable printer driver at the end of a very long day. Instead, I opted to run their SETUP.EXE.
I failed to recognize my real mistake was in not bringing the piece of sh!t printer back to the store on the spot.
So, I lived with the pop-up printer boxes that interfered with Print Managers inherent ability to deal with an out-of-paper situation all by itself. I learned to cancel the toolbox, load the paper, don't cancel the print job, and basically twirl myself around. (That's what it's all about.)
Well, fast forward to two years ago. Stupid me, I plunked down more money for a portable HP photo printer. Ye gods, I'm still plucking crap out of the registry today for that stupid decision. So, I vowed to never purchase HP again.
Having had generally good experiences with IBM printers at work, about a year ago I switched to a Lexmark all-in-one.
Yes, the quicker of you have already begun typing "you dumb *&^%$" into the reply box.
This pop-up nuisance makes my HP experience seem almost divine. By default it's got to use a digitized voice to talk to me about every print job (better have the speakers turned down for those 2:00 AM print tasks.) It clutters up the toolbars, and the task manager. Right now, I can count at least four running tasks that exist so I can do what, ask it for a piece of black and white paper? What heinous fiend sold Lexmark (and by extension me) this crapware? And what prison can I not visit him in?
Try removing HP printer "drivers" some time, or "desktop helpers" that come with video cards, sound cards, TV tuner cards, MP3 players, Bluetooth dongles, printers, scanners, faxes, cameras or any other peripheral your PC may have seen on a TV commercial.
As far as I'm concerned, start arresting them all. I don't want their sh!tware on my box. I want their stuff to sit there nice and quiet up until the moment I want it to do something, and then I want it to do nothing extra. I don't want a pop-up "toolbox" to fix my printer; I don't want a noisy "Lookie what I printed for you, John, aren't you proud of my wonderous inkjets?!" dialog box. And when it's done I want it to get the hell out of my way. Completely. Don't ask me to update, don't leave a tool tray icon behind, don't leave a task running in task manager.
If all this requires sending a few developers to Federal Pound Me In The Ass Prison, all I can say is "don't drop the soap, guys."
Bounds match defines the "start and end" of what will be affected. A typical proxo filter will have something like <img*> which means "Everything inside the img tag will be processed by this filter." You can think of it as a prefilter that reduces the search space for complex searches. For example, many proxo filters edit only javascripts, searching for *window*. Without a prefilter that restricted the search to inside <script>*</script> tags, if you went to the Anderson Windows page you'd probably be disappointed with the results:-). Similarly, if you had a 1MB page, it might spend half an hour matching every bit of text to the first *, not finding the word "window", then shifting over one character and re-searching the rest of the page again. (Yes, *window* is a poor regexp, but proxomitron is supposed to be easy even for people without regexp skills.)
Typically, I'll use a bounds of something like <img*>, then a Matching Expression of <img \0 src="\1/dumbPicture.gif" \2 >. Then, I can replace it with something like <img \0 src="\1/coolPicture.jpg" \2>.
The variables \0 through \9 are exactly equivalent to "*" in a regexp, except whatever it matches it stores so you can put it back in the replacement. The way I did it above preserves all the other attributes, replacing only the "src" attribute. And the \1 parameter saves the path "http://www.foo.com/images" portion of the http://www.foo.com/images/dumbPicture.gif URL. The replacement restores it.
It just occurred to me that my example above has the img tag itself included in both the bounds and expression, and so violates the One Definition Rule. It could probably be written as:
Bounds Match: <img*>
Byte limit: 256
Matching Expression: \0 src="\1/dumbPicture.gif" \2
Replacement Text: <img \1 src="\1/coolPicture.jpg" \2>
To answer your second question, it's quite simple. Leave the Bounds Match blank, put in any random value for byte limit, and put the Matching Expression of <end>. Put your desired script in the Replacement text field, like <script>window.close();</script>. Similarly, you can match for <start> to match the start of the page, so you can insert stuff before any of the rest of the page. Try THAT with your greasemonkey!
I'm not having the problem you're reporting. The Bounds Match doesn't respect "lines" -- it respects only byte counts.
So, lets say you wanted to remove the Red Sherrif web bug javascript, a big multiline script that phones home. You'd set up a Bounds match field with this:
<script*</script>
Then, you'd have a byte limit of 5000. Inside the matching expression, put *imrworldwide*
and put whatever you want in the replacement, or nothing to ignore it completely.
The Bounds Match spans anything. Perhaps the confusing part is that Bounds Match is not a "true regexp": it doesn't terminate at the end of a line. The Search and Replace field is, but not Bounds Match.
I have just started playing with Greasemonkey, and while I think it's a good tool in that so many people are playing with it, I find the Proxomitron to still be much more powerful. Besides, I can paste GM scripts into Proxomitron filters and still use them!
Because there's a lot more to a keyboard than simply pressing buttons. The "action" of a keyboard is very important (how it feels when the keys go down, how much travel they have, when they stop, how much resistance they offer, etc.
For those of us who learned to touch-type on real typewriters back in the 1970s, a crappy keyboard slows us down considerably. For example, I have had the same ancient IBM keyboard on my PC at work for the last 10 years or so. I've gone through 4 PCs in that time, and each time they come with a shiny new Dell keyboard, it gets replaced with the old IBM beater. No "Windows" keys, but I guess that's the price you pay for no-progress. I have a Microsoft keyboard at home, and I don't like it. The keys are slower than the IBM keys, offer slightly more resistance, and the break point isn't the same.
I can barely tolerate using someone else's keyboard when they have something like a cheap-o "Cherry" brand. I may as well be typing with mittens on, they feel so awful.
The "promise" is that you get to watch the movie the day it hits the theater. So on June 20th, you head over to Target and plunk down your $24.99 for your "advance copy" of "The Silmarillion" (starring Tom Hanks as Sauron), but you can't watch it until June 30th (or whatever.) If you pop the RF-DVD in the player, you'll get a commercial or twenty, the theatrical trailer, and probably a pre-release demo of "Shelob, the video game".
No waiting in lines at the theatre, you can just hit "play" at 12:01 AM if you want to watch it as soon as you can.
Great, sign me up too. I can't wait for DRM to make my life better.
(Please note that the previous poster failed to close his <sarcasm> tag, so my post gets it for free!)
PC with Pentium® processor (333MHz MMX min., 733MHz min. recommended for SoftPVR(TM))
Microsoft® Windows® XP/Me/2000/98SE
USB port - 1.1 or 2.0 (performance is the same on either USB 1.1 or 2.0)
Sound card
CD-ROM drive
To me, that says an XBox is probably just above the low edge of equipment that could successfully use this tuner. And Hauppauge is supported by MythTV. Now, you'll have to judge for yourself if you want to trust someone on Slashdot who doesn't even OWN an XBox. But if you've already got a Linux installed on your XBox, it might be worth a shot.
P.S. Note carefully the USB 2.0 claim above: their product is only USB full speed, not USB Hi Speed. USB 1.1 is upwardly compatible with USB 2.0, but does not increase its speed just because it's connected to a faster hub.
Most likely it's something on the one machine. I've run AVG on my computer for years, and have installed it on many family members' computers. No serious problems anywhere.
None of the anti-virus programs are all that great. I've had Norton / Symantec bluescreen my NT and Win2K boxes before, and I'm knocking wood that it hasn't blown any of my XP machines to the ground yet. They all have to get in and mess about at the OS level, so they all introduce performance and stability issues.
I used to get along fine with virus protection turned off, and just relied on careful operation of the computers to keep them safe. I'd turn AV on and refresh it before a download or installation, but other than that I just set it for a weekly scan and forgot about it. With the advent of the network worms, though, that's become simply too risky to continue. (And I did get burned one time by a virus that arrived on a shrinkwrapped installation disk from a vendor. Fortunately, it was caught in the weekly scan before I invoked the infested program.)
What, you don't have internet in your area? Last time I ordered from them, newegg put the merchandise in a box, and gave it to UPS. UPS drove a big brown truck to my front door. Didn't much matter that I don't have a newegg store in my area.
Normally, I buy stuff locally just for the support. But if it's something that isn't stocked locally, it's off to the intarweb.
Slashdot Mirror
Moderators? :-)
I hope this SOX-enforced change comes quickly -- then I can quit violating company policy ( because I'm auto-saving everything with a home-built scraper :-)
And that's not counting the far southern states, where even metropolitan customers typically have no need for residential gas service at all. Electricity or LP makes up their supplemental heat energy needs.
BiG looks like it will be at most a competitor to traditional cable operators. Don't get me wrong, it's a good thing and I'd love to cut my Comcast bill in half due to some serious competition (around here DSL is about a fifth of the speed of residential broadband service for about 75% of the cost.) But it won't solve any BPL problems we don't already face.
When did you get rid of the lamplighters?
Sure, the invention of cat-5 was a work of pure genius. But that doesn't mean every unshielded wire carrying a signal needs to be cat-5 to eliminate interference. For example, look at DSL and ADSL. They're running at speeds far faster than cat-3 was ever designed to run. (And while I don't know how much the interference affects either DSL or competing portions of the spectrum, I know it's certainly not as contentious as BPL.)
Maybe the answer to BPL is a different piece of the spectrum, say something way out there like 7GHz. Buy a few companies a few new satellites to replace the ones suffering from the new interference, and you're golden. Or maybe a lower power signal, with more repeaters. Or maybe some other solution that no genius has come up with yet.
The only thing we know for sure is: BPL in its current incarnation is crap. How stinky the crap is is still up for debate.
Or so the theory goes to a layman such as myself. IANAEE.
HP has been the poster child for how to install crap the wrong way in Windows.
Set the wayback machine for the late 1990s. I bought a fast, expensive HP inkjet. When I got my brand new printer home and tried to "install" it, the "installer" wanted me to run their stuff. Having had prior experience with HP crapware, I said "no thanks, I'll install it myself." So I clicked up the add hardware lizard, and said "I'll for search myself, and I have a disk, thank you." When I selected the correct HP driver, only a dialog box appeared, informing me "ERROR: You must run SETUP.EXE from this disk in order to install the printer driver."
Yes, I'm sure I could have un-cabbed whatever real driver files there were, made dozens of appropriately arcane registry entries by hand, and had a mostly unstable printer driver at the end of a very long day. Instead, I opted to run their SETUP.EXE.
I failed to recognize my real mistake was in not bringing the piece of sh!t printer back to the store on the spot.
So, I lived with the pop-up printer boxes that interfered with Print Managers inherent ability to deal with an out-of-paper situation all by itself. I learned to cancel the toolbox, load the paper, don't cancel the print job, and basically twirl myself around. (That's what it's all about.)
Well, fast forward to two years ago. Stupid me, I plunked down more money for a portable HP photo printer. Ye gods, I'm still plucking crap out of the registry today for that stupid decision. So, I vowed to never purchase HP again.
Having had generally good experiences with IBM printers at work, about a year ago I switched to a Lexmark all-in-one.
Yes, the quicker of you have already begun typing "you dumb *&^%$" into the reply box.
This pop-up nuisance makes my HP experience seem almost divine. By default it's got to use a digitized voice to talk to me about every print job (better have the speakers turned down for those 2:00 AM print tasks.) It clutters up the toolbars, and the task manager. Right now, I can count at least four running tasks that exist so I can do what, ask it for a piece of black and white paper? What heinous fiend sold Lexmark (and by extension me) this crapware? And what prison can I not visit him in?
As far as I'm concerned, start arresting them all. I don't want their sh!tware on my box. I want their stuff to sit there nice and quiet up until the moment I want it to do something, and then I want it to do nothing extra. I don't want a pop-up "toolbox" to fix my printer; I don't want a noisy "Lookie what I printed for you, John, aren't you proud of my wonderous inkjets?!" dialog box. And when it's done I want it to get the hell out of my way. Completely. Don't ask me to update, don't leave a tool tray icon behind, don't leave a task running in task manager.
If all this requires sending a few developers to Federal Pound Me In The Ass Prison, all I can say is "don't drop the soap, guys."
Oh, come on, the governor is going to sign ANYTHING Redmond wants signed. If Bill Gates wants Sasquatch dead, Sasquatch is gonna die. Make no mistake.
BTW, posthumously nicknaming the dog 'Smokey' was deemed "insensitive" by my wife. 'Sparky' didn't go over too well, either.
Bounds match defines the "start and end" of what will be affected. A typical proxo filter will have something like <img*> which means "Everything inside the img tag will be processed by this filter." You can think of it as a prefilter that reduces the search space for complex searches. For example, many proxo filters edit only javascripts, searching for *window*. Without a prefilter that restricted the search to inside <script>*</script> tags, if you went to the Anderson Windows page you'd probably be disappointed with the results :-). Similarly, if you had a 1MB page, it might spend half an hour matching every bit of text to the first *, not finding the word "window", then shifting over one character and re-searching the rest of the page again. (Yes, *window* is a poor regexp, but proxomitron is supposed to be easy even for people without regexp skills.)
Typically, I'll use a bounds of something like <img*>, then a Matching Expression of <img \0 src="\1/dumbPicture.gif" \2 >. Then, I can replace it with something like <img \0 src="\1/coolPicture.jpg" \2>.
The variables \0 through \9 are exactly equivalent to "*" in a regexp, except whatever it matches it stores so you can put it back in the replacement. The way I did it above preserves all the other attributes, replacing only the "src" attribute. And the \1 parameter saves the path "http://www.foo.com/images" portion of the http://www.foo.com/images/dumbPicture.gif URL. The replacement restores it.
It just occurred to me that my example above has the img tag itself included in both the bounds and expression, and so violates the One Definition Rule. It could probably be written as:
Bounds Match: <img*>
Byte limit: 256
Matching Expression: \0 src="\1/dumbPicture.gif" \2
Replacement Text: <img \1 src="\1/coolPicture.jpg" \2>
To answer your second question, it's quite simple. Leave the Bounds Match blank, put in any random value for byte limit, and put the Matching Expression of <end>. Put your desired script in the Replacement text field, like <script>window.close();</script>. Similarly, you can match for <start> to match the start of the page, so you can insert stuff before any of the rest of the page. Try THAT with your greasemonkey!
So, lets say you wanted to remove the Red Sherrif web bug javascript, a big multiline script that phones home. You'd set up a Bounds match field with this:
<script*</script>
Then, you'd have a byte limit of 5000. Inside the matching expression, put
*imrworldwide*
and put whatever you want in the replacement, or nothing to ignore it completely.
The Bounds Match spans anything. Perhaps the confusing part is that Bounds Match is not a "true regexp": it doesn't terminate at the end of a line. The Search and Replace field is, but not Bounds Match.
I have just started playing with Greasemonkey, and while I think it's a good tool in that so many people are playing with it, I find the Proxomitron to still be much more powerful. Besides, I can paste GM scripts into Proxomitron filters and still use them!
No way! I'm not letting that beeatch anywhere near my junk, even if it is only from the other direction.
Oh, great. The only useful (or at least interesting-sounding link here) is already slashdotted.
For those of us who learned to touch-type on real typewriters back in the 1970s, a crappy keyboard slows us down considerably. For example, I have had the same ancient IBM keyboard on my PC at work for the last 10 years or so. I've gone through 4 PCs in that time, and each time they come with a shiny new Dell keyboard, it gets replaced with the old IBM beater. No "Windows" keys, but I guess that's the price you pay for no-progress. I have a Microsoft keyboard at home, and I don't like it. The keys are slower than the IBM keys, offer slightly more resistance, and the break point isn't the same.
I can barely tolerate using someone else's keyboard when they have something like a cheap-o "Cherry" brand. I may as well be typing with mittens on, they feel so awful.
Hey, you crossposted from rec.foods.sticky into comp.editors.vi!!!
No waiting in lines at the theatre, you can just hit "play" at 12:01 AM if you want to watch it as soon as you can.
Great, sign me up too. I can't wait for DRM to make my life better.
(Please note that the previous poster failed to close his <sarcasm> tag, so my post gets it for free!)
Anyone else remember Ruby, and the Tookah?
"Soylent Light & Electric" IS PEOPLE!!!!!!!
However, I understand there are people who have built USB cables for their XBoxen. And the spex for the Hauppauge WinTV-USB external tuner do say the following:
System Requirements
- PC with Pentium® processor (333MHz MMX min., 733MHz min. recommended for SoftPVR(TM))
- Microsoft® Windows® XP/Me/2000/98SE
- USB port - 1.1 or 2.0 (performance is the same on either USB 1.1 or 2.0)
- Sound card
- CD-ROM drive
To me, that says an XBox is probably just above the low edge of equipment that could successfully use this tuner. And Hauppauge is supported by MythTV. Now, you'll have to judge for yourself if you want to trust someone on Slashdot who doesn't even OWN an XBox. But if you've already got a Linux installed on your XBox, it might be worth a shot.P.S. Note carefully the USB 2.0 claim above: their product is only USB full speed, not USB Hi Speed. USB 1.1 is upwardly compatible with USB 2.0, but does not increase its speed just because it's connected to a faster hub.
None of the anti-virus programs are all that great. I've had Norton / Symantec bluescreen my NT and Win2K boxes before, and I'm knocking wood that it hasn't blown any of my XP machines to the ground yet. They all have to get in and mess about at the OS level, so they all introduce performance and stability issues.
I used to get along fine with virus protection turned off, and just relied on careful operation of the computers to keep them safe. I'd turn AV on and refresh it before a download or installation, but other than that I just set it for a weekly scan and forgot about it. With the advent of the network worms, though, that's become simply too risky to continue. (And I did get burned one time by a virus that arrived on a shrinkwrapped installation disk from a vendor. Fortunately, it was caught in the weekly scan before I invoked the infested program.)
A Hauppauge USB-PVR tuner. You did build the USB cable for your XBox, didn't you?
After enough time has passed, people think making the drumming sound was the point all along.
What, Slashdot stopped being an anti-Microsoft site? When did that happen? I didn't get the memo! I'm not getting my memos!
Normally, I buy stuff locally just for the support. But if it's something that isn't stocked locally, it's off to the intarweb.