Here's a quotation from the article that cuts both ways:
Perhaps Theodore Geisel, Dr. Seuss' inventor, had the best advice, albeit not from The Cat in the Hat: "You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose."
If your ISP ends up imposing CAT on you, and you don't agree with it, then switch providers. I switched from cable to ADSL to get a much less draconian AUP.
So How is this different from the CADC?
on
Virtual Astronomy
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· Score: 2, Informative
The CADC was established in 1986 as one of three world-wide distribution centres for data from the Hubble Space Telescope. HST archive is possible through a grant from the Canadian Space Agency.
Most of the CADC software development is done in collaboration with the European Southern Observatories located in Garching, near Munchen, Germany and the Space Telescope - European Coordinating Facilities.
The mandate of the CADC includes
operating and maintaining an archive of all the scientific data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).
operating and maintaining an archive of all the scientific data collected by the Canada France Hawaii Telescope (CFHT).
developing software tools for maximizing the scientific usefulness of astronomical archives.
promoting the concept of astronomical data archives in the community.
providing technical information and user support on using data from the our archives.
Besides- who says the government CAN"T break them already? It probably just takes a bit more effort...
Yes, but installing Carnivore everywhere now gives them a plausible explanation for being able to break the encryption without having to expose the existence of their big iron and fancy algorithms.
Here's what I use, since I like to know where I am, and I like a shortish prompt:
PS1='${PWD##$PREFIX}$ '
PREFIX=*/
This shows me the basename of my current directory. Another good setting is PREFIX=$HOME/, which displays my current working directory as a relative path to home (if I'm under it), otherwise the complete pathname. Note that $PREFIX is a glob pattern, not a regular expression.
I don't use VT100-style colour changes in my prompts, because they don't play well (for example) within an Emacs shell buffer.
Too bad Gracenote already thought of this, and one of the conditions of their EULA is that you will not connect to a competing database service (aka FreeDB)
This would seem to say that Slashdot's use of a picture of a SPAM can to denote stories about UCE (Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail) is against their policy. And though I know I'll get modded down for saying it I can see their point.
However, for this story (only) the icon is appropriate. We are discussing "SPAM" as well as "spam".
But wait! It gets better. Wait until you want to search past/. articles for something "useful" that matches one of these pranks.
Hopefully the editors will add updates to the front pages of each of these stories once they get stale, stating that they are AF gags. That way people using/. as a reference won't be fooled in, say, September, when they aren't expecting it.
What am I saying? This is/. after all.... Who in their right mind will use it for reference ?:-)
>Happy E-week everybody! ERTW!
Too bad National Engineering Week in Canada is the first week in March, not the first week in February. UBC 'geers continue to get it wrong.
The biggest problem I see with Outlook/Exchange is that it is (almost) a Mail Motel. Your mail checks in but never checks out.
If you are running Exchange, you could turn on IMAP support, and then suck all your messages out into a local folder using Netscape (I've gone the other way when my last employer mandated Exchange email for everyone). If you are using Outlook Express for your home email (as I was, since my wife wouldn't use UNIX), your mail is trapped in Outlook Express' proprietary binary format forever.
Microsoft does not provide an easy (or even moderately difficult) method for you to discard their products, and that's something that needs to be accounted for in the total cost of ownership of anything MS.
I think of Perforce (http://www.perforce.com/) as CVS on steroids. My employer looked at a whole bunch of different SCM tools (including ClearCase) and chose Perforce. Having not personally used ClearCase, I cannot comment on it, but I have heard that it is very intrusive in the way you work. It's also very pricey compared with Perforce.
If you use CVS or RCS to manage your source trees, moving to Perforce will not be that much of a stretch since your nightly build scripts will not need much tweaking (you do have nightly builds, don't you?). Indeed there is at least one CVS-style frontend to Perforce available from their website.
Perforce's big wins over CVS:
atomic checkins: either all files get updated or none do
integration records: you can tell where a revision was branched/merged to (and from!)
handling of deleted files is less clunky
I am never going back to CVS, Perforce wins hands down (and, yes, it's available for Linux (and *BSD too)).
All these archives are searchable from the web site, and (if you've registered with them) available for download. Images from HST and CADC are restricted to only the primary researcher(s) for a period of time (I think it's a year).
I read a plea for using ëmail instead of email, e-mail (or even E-mail) a few years back (which is a lifetime in Internet Years). The rationale is that historically the dieresis has signified that the next vowel is to be treated as a separate syllable (e.g., "Charlotte Brontë", "coöperate"), but lost favour when computer typesetters couldn't reproduce them. You have to look at older books (usually from the UK) to see the dieresis in action. We just have to generalize the rule of when to use it to include the first syllable of a word.
When I wear my neo-pedant's hat, I try to resurrect the dieresis. It's a proper (useful) English diacritic mark, which always gets confused with the umlaut, a German diacritic with a completely different purpose. Now that ISO 10646 is slowly replacing ASCII, the dieresis can reclaim its place in English!
I would heartily recommend using Perforce (http://www.perforce.com/) instead of CVS for any non-trivial CM tasks. It is not Free, but it is not outrageously expensive (compared with others out there).
I think of Perforce as "CVS on steroids", because it offers so much more power:
there is fine-grain access control on the repository, on a per-user, per-group, per-IP, per-pathname basis.
extensive meta-information is kept: both forward and backward integration records
the server keeps a database of files being edited in every client view, so you know what everyone else is working on.
automatic merging between branches actually works (I never trusted rcsmerge or cvsmerge, I use perforce's "integrate" all the time)
it is fast
repository changes are guaranteed atomic. Nothing is ever half-submitted
changes (across the entire repository) are sequentially numbered, so each change can be uniquely identified (and changenumbers are like timestamps measured in the change domain)
Perforce uses "Inter-File Branching" (tm) when it branches, and RCS format for its repository files. There's a white paper on their web site describing it, but basically this means that when you branch a file (e.g. from revision 1.2->1.2.1.1 in CVS), you create a new filename in the repository. It may sound hokey, but it works better, IMHO. For one thing, it eliminates the forward deltas in the,v files. Which means you get rid of the O(n^2) behaviour of RCS/CVS when trying to retrieve branches.
[I have no affiliation with Perforce other than being a very satisfied customer.]
Too bad you don't follow your father's example:-)...
> "Settle your differences before you get to court. For, if you go to court, neither of you will get what you want." (From some old book I read once.) [emphasis added]
AT&T even slams in Canada (or did a couple of years ago). A door-to-door slime^H^H^H^H^Hmarketer came to our door asking my wife if she would like to switch. After repeated and emphatic "No"s, he eventually left. I guess he decided that his quota for the day/month/week wasn't met, because he switched us anyways. Despite having some form on his little clipboard that we should have had to sign, stating that we wanted to switch. Nope, he just forged a signature.
We got a call a couple of weeks later from (then) BCTel (now Telus) asking us why we switched and wouldn't we please come back. After resetting our long distance to BCTel, we also had a lock put on our line. The rep confided that there were quite a few incidents of AT&T in particular having slammed people (at that time).
I don't know if slamming is still going on now, or if my lock on my line is holding. I'm still pleased to let my long distance charges subsidize my local line.
jelwell wrote "Wenger is the Genuine Swiss Army Knife."
Whether or not it is the genuine article, I'm just pleased that they make a left-handed version of their Traveller knife.
No, left-handed knives are not a gimmick. They are extremely useful to us southpaws. My knife is a complete mirror image of a "standard" knife, optimized for the left hand rather than the right:
the blade is on the other side of the knife,
all the thumbnail indents for opening the implements are on the other side,
the corkscrew turns counter-clockwise,
and most importantly, the scissors are left-handed (the top blade is on the left)
With this knife, I have one less reason to curse at the dextrocentric world (my pet peeves are spatula/flippers that have a diagonal edge and ladles that only have one spout. Grr Argh!)
At the end of every year, the rock radio stations in every market (that I've been in) will have a listener poll for the "best song of 19xx", in which one fills out a ballot in some newspaper and mails it in. The great unwashed masses will always vote for the most-hyped, not necessarily the most deserving.
Case in point: my personal favourite was a few years back, where the local radio station's year-end poll was for "best song of all time": "Bohemian Rhapsody" won. Coincidentally, that was the year in which "Wayne's World" was released. The same station had the same poll the next year, B.R. didn't even place.
Don't take these polls seriously, they're just comic relief.
One of the points made by TSWSM was how sequels are usually (always?) worse than the originals. Not only were they parodying the most-hyped film of '99, but also the second-most hyped one (themselves). There was quite alot of self-parody in there.
The thing that really annoyed me was how moronic the majority of the audience were. Did they not watch the credits of AP? Did they not think "gee, maybe they'll do the same thing?" I guess not. Everyone else stood up as soon as the credits started rolling and made like lemmings to the exits. The first bits of extra footage stopped them in their tracks, but they didn't bother to sit down. Idiots. So that ends, they start moving to the exit again. "Duh, that must be it, even though the text has moved over to the other side of the screen". Idiots, they actually seemed surprised when the second bit started. By the time all the credits had rolled by, there were 6 people left in the theatre, 4 of whom actually saw the last bit (the other two were making out in the back row).
Ob Spoiler:"I've made a makeshift splint. Here goes nothing.... Augh!"
Slashdot Mirror
Just to be a pedant, Newfoundland joined confederation in 1949. Thus, in 1901 Newfoundland was still a colony of Great Britain.
If your ISP ends up imposing CAT on you, and you don't agree with it, then switch providers. I switched from cable to ADSL to get a much less draconian AUP.
From their web pages:
8 millibits per second? No wonder it tanked. :-P
Oh, did he mean MHz? Never mind :-)
Yes, but installing Carnivore everywhere now gives them a plausible explanation for being able to break the encryption without having to expose the existence of their big iron and fancy algorithms.
Does anyone here know (definitively?) what is preventing ReplayTV and Tivo from selling units in Canada? My theories are:
Anyone else have any other theories, or (gasp) actual facts?
This shows me the basename of my current directory. Another good setting is PREFIX=$HOME/, which displays my current working directory as a relative path to home (if I'm under it), otherwise the complete pathname. Note that $PREFIX is a glob pattern, not a regular expression.
I don't use VT100-style colour changes in my prompts, because they don't play well (for example) within an Emacs shell buffer.
Too bad Gracenote already thought of this, and one of the conditions of their EULA is that you will not connect to a competing database service (aka FreeDB)
Force.
However, for this story (only) the icon is appropriate. We are discussing "SPAM" as well as "spam".
Hopefully the editors will add updates to the front pages of each of these stories once they get stale, stating that they are AF gags. That way people using /. as a reference won't be fooled in, say, September, when they aren't expecting it.
What am I saying? This is /. after all.... Who in their right mind will use it for reference ? :-)
>Happy E-week everybody! ERTW!
Too bad National Engineering Week in Canada is the first week in March, not the first week in February. UBC 'geers continue to get it wrong.
If you are running Exchange, you could turn on IMAP support, and then suck all your messages out into a local folder using Netscape (I've gone the other way when my last employer mandated Exchange email for everyone). If you are using Outlook Express for your home email (as I was, since my wife wouldn't use UNIX), your mail is trapped in Outlook Express' proprietary binary format forever.
Microsoft does not provide an easy (or even moderately difficult) method for you to discard their products, and that's something that needs to be accounted for in the total cost of ownership of anything MS.
If you use CVS or RCS to manage your source trees, moving to Perforce will not be that much of a stretch since your nightly build scripts will not need much tweaking (you do have nightly builds, don't you?). Indeed there is at least one CVS-style frontend to Perforce available from their website.
Perforce's big wins over CVS:
I am never going back to CVS, Perforce wins hands down (and, yes, it's available for Linux (and *BSD too)).
It's not free, or even cheap :-(
On the plus side, you can download nice PDF versions of their reference manual and user guide for free, and hopefully the syntax is close to J.
All these archives are searchable from the web site, and (if you've registered with them) available for download. Images from HST and CADC are restricted to only the primary researcher(s) for a period of time (I think it's a year).
[Reminiscent of the dog/hound inversion that happened in (Old? Middle?) English: "hound" was the generic term, "dog" was a specific type of "hound".]
(It also looks really cool, as lots of heavy metal bands have discovered :-)
- Förce
When I wear my neo-pedant's hat, I try to resurrect the dieresis. It's a proper (useful) English diacritic mark, which always gets confused with the umlaut, a German diacritic with a completely different purpose. Now that ISO 10646 is slowly replacing ASCII, the dieresis can reclaim its place in English!
Bring back the dieresis!
I think of Perforce as "CVS on steroids", because it offers so much more power:
Perforce uses "Inter-File Branching" (tm) when it branches, and RCS format for its repository files. There's a white paper on their web site describing it, but basically this means that when you branch a file (e.g. from revision 1.2->1.2.1.1 in CVS), you create a new filename in the repository. It may sound hokey, but it works better, IMHO. For one thing, it eliminates the forward deltas in the ,v files. Which means you get rid of the O(n^2) behaviour of RCS/CVS when trying to retrieve branches.
[I have no affiliation with Perforce other than being a very satisfied customer.]
> And, he always cited respectfully
:-) ...
Too bad you don't follow your father's example
> "Settle your differences before you get to court. For, if you go to court, neither of you will get what you want." (From some old book I read once.)
[emphasis added]
We got a call a couple of weeks later from (then) BCTel (now Telus) asking us why we switched and wouldn't we please come back. After resetting our long distance to BCTel, we also had a lock put on our line. The rep confided that there were quite a few incidents of AT&T in particular having slammed people (at that time).
I don't know if slamming is still going on now, or if my lock on my line is holding. I'm still pleased to let my long distance charges subsidize my local line.
Whether or not it is the genuine article, I'm just pleased that they make a left-handed version of their Traveller knife.
No, left-handed knives are not a gimmick. They are extremely useful to us southpaws. My knife is a complete mirror image of a "standard" knife, optimized for the left hand rather than the right:
With this knife, I have one less reason to curse at the dextrocentric world (my pet peeves are spatula/flippers that have a diagonal edge and ladles that only have one spout. Grr Argh!)
Case in point: my personal favourite was a few years back, where the local radio station's year-end poll was for "best song of all time": "Bohemian Rhapsody" won. Coincidentally, that was the year in which "Wayne's World" was released. The same station had the same poll the next year, B.R. didn't even place.
Don't take these polls seriously, they're just comic relief.
The thing that really annoyed me was how moronic the majority of the audience were. Did they not watch the credits of AP? Did they not think "gee, maybe they'll do the same thing?" I guess not. Everyone else stood up as soon as the credits started rolling and made like lemmings to the exits. The first bits of extra footage stopped them in their tracks, but they didn't bother to sit down. Idiots. So that ends, they start moving to the exit again. "Duh, that must be it, even though the text has moved over to the other side of the screen". Idiots, they actually seemed surprised when the second bit started. By the time all the credits had rolled by, there were 6 people left in the theatre, 4 of whom actually saw the last bit (the other two were making out in the back row).
Ob Spoiler: "I've made a makeshift splint. Here goes nothing. ... Augh!"