And if you are going to say how safe the country has been with the new stasi... I will be blunt here, for I feel very strongly on this point. There is no secret police in America. The closest that we have come is with a bunch of telcoms either too chicken or too stupid to not comply with the FBI/CIA's illegal requests. However, there is no secret police in the United States.
Stasi != Gestapo.
Stasi; short for Ministerium fuer Staatssicherheit; translated: Department of State/Homeland Security. Existed in the former communist East Germany and encouraged spying on all the individuals by individuals. Gestapo = acronymn for 'GEheime STAats POlizei' - Secret State Police. This was under the Third Reich.
I also like the fact that I can work in every other European country. In fact if you have lived in another European country for more than a certain amount of time (2 years?) You can also vote in that country in many places now - not all elections yet, but we're moving in that direction.
Apart from the same money, Europeans also now share the same driving license.
Regarding commonality: There's more than the Euro, but not much: we now also have the same driving license. But I can't really think of much else at the moment...
The problem with democracy in Europe is that people use the EU elections to voice their frustrations and vote all the radical parties to show their dissatisfaction with the currently ruling administration in their own member state because the parliament doesn't have much power anyway.. So all kinds of really radical parties get voted in which people would never dream of voting into their own parliaments.
People actually say that the EU parliament has a much greater voice now than it did a decade ago - I also agree with other postings that the only way to make it more democratic is to give it enough powers so that people actually start caring. Right now, people use the EU elections for nothing but to voice their frustrations at their own goverment. This includes I believe even the referendums for the constitution: Their government is for it? People vote against - their government is against it? The people would have voted for it.
I believe that once the economic growth has gone on for a while and people are not fearing losing their jobs anymore as was the case in most countries that voted against the election, maybe we have a chance to get the constitution through. Without it, the EU will become a group of states that cannot do anything because all decisions have to be unanimous.
I still think of myself as a European though rather than a German - that being mainly because I grew up in the UK, lived in Germany for most of my life, spent quite some years in the USA where I really saw that there was a difference between European (not just English/German) mentality. In my work, half of the people I work with in the office are Dutch/other half is German.
People in Europe are brought up to be a lot more critical about their government, in the US for quite some time after 9/11 it was unheard of to criticize the president - US news just wasn't worth watching because it was all so one sided. Thankfully that has gotten a lot better again (I left the US two months ago). In the US, the goverment says something, the people believe it with almost no questions asked. Not so here. What's not so good here is that people here rely too much on the government - in the US people rely more on themselves. If you're out of a job or are earning too little money, Americans get another job - here in Europe people ask for unemployment pay. US and gun laws - after the shootings at that school people saying that if everybody had a gun, it would not have been as bad... No thanks... But I have to admit US gun laws are similar to having a law to impose a speed limit on the Autobahn in Germany- no government would ever be elected or reelected if they did that. It is just something cultural. In the US it seems that the government wants to only have a few educated people and a lot of not so educated people - Universities there are just so prohibitively expensive. This is one of the main reasons I came back actually because my gf wants to study. 500 Euros a semester, that's a joke comparing it to US prices. Then, we have more taxes here, but you get a lot for them - you get good roads (I am always amazed when I come from the US how good they are here), you get the university education.
Getting back to the Galileo program - there needs to be an EU government which have something to say. And they should press through the Galileo system. It is vital. Right now, I fear that it is not strong enough yet and it will stay at the one 1 satellite. I hope I am wrong.
I was already shocked when I lived in the US to which degree this is already done.
The most shocking thing to me was entering a night club one night to verify my age. Nothing wrong with that - but I got a little bit upset when they put the card into a scanner to read the 2d barcode on the back of the license "for age verification purposes".
I'm sure this device did more than age verification. I'm pretty sure that they also stored my name, address, DL number, DOB etc. into a nice database - and I'm also sure that this device (all it takes is software) didn't just read NJ licenses, but probably licenses from all the 50 states, at least those that have 2d barcodes. While there may be laws against collecting this type of data (are there? I sure hope so! In Germany they are pretty strict), i'm not really sure these are enforceable and would be enforced.
As these things exist already, all a national ID Card will do is to make these devices cheaper as it will make writing the software a little easier because only one type of card needs to be supported. If they're cheaper, these devices will spread more than they have already I fear.
Here in Germany where we have a national identity card I've had to show it a lot less than all the decades I lived in Germany before going to the US than I had to show my driving license in the 3.5 years I lived in New Jersey. There's no barcode, but there is the machine readable text which is the same as a passport (which has your name, DOB and card number). I've never seen anyone that had a scanner for these outside of customs when entering the country or airlines when checking in.
the cool thing about elite on the speccy though was that it had the bug where you could fly out of the space station, do a 180 turn, hyperspace and fly back in to the target. Made trading easy as properly docking was next to impossible. After you had your docking computer, it was fun...
Bad thing about Elite was the stupid lense lock.
My other fave games: Jet Set Willy (classic - poke 35899,0 - 23 years later i still remember it), Wheelie (already mentioned), Sabre Wulf. But what it had over the C64 (which I had before the speccy) was that it had a decent basic. On the C64 you couldn't do anything graphical without machine language. Though because of the slowness I did eventually learn Z80 machine language.
I still have my Speccy with rubber keyboard, (which i later upgraded to a plus and then bought a 128K) - I even had a mouse for it...
POKE 35899,0 is the poke I also still most remember. Even 20 years later, wake me up in the middle of the night and ask me "How do you get infinite lives in Jet Set Willy" and I could tell you:-)
The neatest one liner: FOR n=1 TO 80:CIRCLE n,n,n: NEXT n
The DevPac Assember was also cool.
Anyone remember the teach-it yourself programming course, where one issue came out every week called INPUT? I still have them.
My speccy setup:
Spectrum 48K (sometime along the line: upgraded to a Plus, then replaced with a 128K version) Interface 1 Timex thermal printer AMX Mouse Microdrive Epson FX80 with serial port.
I wrote most of my school assignments with Tasword 2, if I ever needed any artwork done, I fired up Artstudio...
Artsudio - it used a Lenslock.... I hated those damn things.. This was a piece of plastic with you put on the screen, pressed buttons until the box was as big as the piece of plastic, and then looking through the lenses, you could see two characters which you couldn't see without it. 3 wrong entries and you had to load the app from cassette again... 5 minutes wasted.
I never really read Crash, because I was more into writing my own software rather than playing games, but but I never missed an issue of "Your Sinclair" - they had a cool style of writing and I also never missed "ZX Computing monthly" which focussed mainly on writing your own programs.
I did leave a 1% uncertainty - and I was in charge of testing Win2K, not NT.
So I know all the stuff that is in W2K FS, like the system databases, SFP files, sparse files, mount points, directory junctions, hard links, multiple file streams, SIS, data in remote storage,.... Plus I did this 2 years ago as an intern.
I think that people would like and listen a lot more to you if you did not write in such an abusive way. Ever heard of netiquette?
NTFS5 (ie Windows 2000) is the first MS filesystem that offered a changejournal.
At least the backup vendor I work for only supports scanning for changes since the last full via Change Journal only for W2K. If change journal always existed, wy do not offer this feature for NT?
Having done a lot of work on W2K Filesystem 2 years ago (not programming, but testing), I am 99% sure that only NTFS5 and above support journaling.
Another way you can see this is when you pull out the plug, NT takes ages, W2K come up pretty fast again.
I like AIM. I really do. Its client for Linux is rather lacking, but a lot of people have it. It doesn't seem as bloated as ICQ, but it still has a lot of features. And you can bet just about anyone online has an AIM SN. The service is rather reliable, too, I've found.
I really do too. Me and a girl I met when I was in the US exchange a lot of pictures, and it is really neat that in AIM you can embed pictures into the text whereas in other IMs these have to be transferred seperately via files. Whereas with AIM you can post an image, and later when you read the text again, you still know which images you were talking about.
Also direct connects work through my linux NAT gateway, which I think is pretty cool. It only started doing this a few versions ago, before that I had to setup a SOCKS proxy for direct connects to work, but with newer versions, you just install and it works.
Also, AIM has the best smileys:-D
gaim is pretty cool on my linux box, which I normally access from an LTSP box, but I prefer the original AIM client on my XP box, eventhough I know gaim exists for that too.
I feel guilty, I've recommended them in 3 posts so far in this thread - but I am really just a customer that loves the service. I am not Jeremy or Rob (who come from Australia). I don't really want to advertise.
I have my own domain at namecheap (8.88 a year), nameservers for it at zoneedit.com because I like their dynip stuff and IPv6 support, and the MX records for it point to fastmail.fm.
I love it!!!! I have full control, reliable email, and I know the people that manage it belong to the most knowledgeable people about email on Earth (who else hacks around in IMAP code, writes white papers about why the Spamcop block list is flawed....)
Email is a lot more complex than people realise, and these people are just great, and they respond to you and you get to know them via the independant forum. Need a feature change? Ask them!!!
Spam assassin and a sieve script takes care of spam permanently.
All my spam comes in via the gmx and university address I forward to it, but close to 100% of spam end up in my designated spam folders. OK, it took me a while to fine tune spam scores together with spam assassin hit criteria to make it work 100% for me, but I love it sooo much!!!
I would recommend fastmail.fm to everyone, and I do not work for them.
The database is put into "backup" mode, this means that all transactions do NOT get written to the actual database file, which can then be backed up. During this time, the database is still fully functional though, because all changes during this time get written to "patch files". So it is fully operational, just a little slower as it first has to check the "patch" files before checking the database files. And Database backups are mighty fast - like 35 Gig/hour or so. Once the actual database has been copied, the database file is put out of backup mode and the patch file is also written to the backup media. This is at least how it works for the backup vendor which I work for. We do the same thing for Oracle.
The database stays fully functional (online) while we perform the backup.
As far as I know, both Postgres and MySql do not support online backups.
This makes it unusable for a lot of enterprises.
Also, many people here do not seem to be aware that MySQL with InnoDB tables can do commits/rollbacks and in the last C'T [German Computer magazine] there was an article about MySQL and ACID.
I thought that Bell Atlantic was much worse, when I lived in New Jersey for 6 months (now 2 years ago)
At least when DT charges the 50, you get equipment from them, often installed by them by an engineer. But Bell Atlantic, they charge you for something that is just an input in a computer:
Example: signing up for voicemail was a change in service that cost me $15 I think, together with an additional $10 to set up forwarding so that voicemail would even work.. I felt a bit ripped off, but on the other hand, I didn't use them to make any toll calls, so I guess they have to make money somewhere.
DT does (better did) not charge for setup fees for "virtual services" like Voicemail, Call Forwarding etc. And VM is a lot cheaper too (a year ago it was 1 Euro extra, if not included already in the service plan), and it also does faxes. But sadly, they are starting to charge setup fees all over the place now too.
If you sign up for ISDN XXL+ DSL at 1und1.de for example, you get a simple ISDN PABX to which you can connect two analogue phones + one analogue "auxilary" device (answering machine, modem) for 9 Euros.
Other places offer similar deals.
Real ISDN phones are sadly expensive, but also very cool.
Slashdot Mirror
Stasi != Gestapo.
Stasi; short for Ministerium fuer Staatssicherheit; translated: Department of State/Homeland Security. Existed in the former communist East Germany and encouraged spying on all the individuals by individuals.
Gestapo = acronymn for 'GEheime STAats POlizei' - Secret State Police. This was under the Third Reich.
I also like the fact that I can work in every other European country. In fact if you have lived in another European country for more than a certain amount of time (2 years?) You can also vote in that country in many places now - not all elections yet, but we're moving in that direction.
Apart from the same money, Europeans also now share the same driving license.
Regarding commonality: There's more than the Euro, but not much: we now also have the same driving license. But I can't really think of much else at the moment...
The problem with democracy in Europe is that people use the EU elections to voice their frustrations and vote all the radical parties to show their dissatisfaction with the currently ruling administration in their own member state because the parliament doesn't have much power anyway.. So all kinds of really radical parties get voted in which people would never dream of voting into their own parliaments.
People actually say that the EU parliament has a much greater voice now than it did a decade ago - I also agree with other postings that the only way to make it more democratic is to give it enough powers so that people actually start caring. Right now, people use the EU elections for nothing but to voice their frustrations at their own goverment. This includes I believe even the referendums for the constitution: Their government is for it? People vote against - their government is against it? The people would have voted for it.
I believe that once the economic growth has gone on for a while and people are not fearing losing their jobs anymore as was the case in most countries that voted against the election, maybe we have a chance to get the constitution through. Without it, the EU will become a group of states that cannot do anything because all decisions have to be unanimous.
I still think of myself as a European though rather than a German - that being mainly because I grew up in the UK, lived in Germany for most of my life, spent quite some years in the USA where I really saw that there was a difference between European (not just English/German) mentality. In my work, half of the people I work with in the office are Dutch/other half is German.
People in Europe are brought up to be a lot more critical about their government, in the US for quite some time after 9/11 it was unheard of to criticize the president - US news just wasn't worth watching because it was all so one sided. Thankfully that has gotten a lot better again (I left the US two months ago). In the US, the goverment says something, the people believe it with almost no questions asked. Not so here.
What's not so good here is that people here rely too much on the government - in the US people rely more on themselves. If you're out of a job or are earning too little money, Americans get another job - here in Europe people ask for unemployment pay.
US and gun laws - after the shootings at that school people saying that if everybody had a gun, it would not have been as bad... No thanks... But I have to admit US gun laws are similar to having a law to impose a speed limit on the Autobahn in Germany- no government would ever be elected or reelected if they did that. It is just something cultural.
In the US it seems that the government wants to only have a few educated people and a lot of not so educated people - Universities there are just so prohibitively expensive. This is one of the main reasons I came back actually because my gf wants to study. 500 Euros a semester, that's a joke comparing it to US prices.
Then, we have more taxes here, but you get a lot for them - you get good roads (I am always amazed when I come from the US how good they are here), you get the university education.
Getting back to the Galileo program - there needs to be an EU government which have something to say. And they should press through the Galileo system. It is vital. Right now, I fear that it is not strong enough yet and it will stay at the one 1 satellite. I hope I am wrong.
I was already shocked when I lived in the US to which degree this is already done.
The most shocking thing to me was entering a night club one night to verify my age. Nothing wrong with that - but I got a little bit upset when they put the card into a scanner to read the 2d barcode on the back of the license "for age verification purposes".
I'm sure this device did more than age verification. I'm pretty sure that they also stored my name, address, DL number, DOB etc. into a nice database - and I'm also sure that this device (all it takes is software) didn't just read NJ licenses, but probably licenses from all the 50 states, at least those that have 2d barcodes. While there may be laws against collecting this type of data (are there? I sure hope so! In Germany they are pretty strict), i'm not really sure these are enforceable and would be enforced.
As these things exist already, all a national ID Card will do is to make these devices cheaper as it will make writing the software a little easier because only one type of card needs to be supported. If they're cheaper, these devices will spread more than they have already I fear.
Here in Germany where we have a national identity card I've had to show it a lot less than all the decades I lived in Germany before going to the US than I had to show my driving license in the 3.5 years I lived in New Jersey. There's no barcode, but there is the machine readable text which is the same as a passport (which has your name, DOB and card number). I've never seen anyone that had a scanner for these outside of customs when entering the country or airlines when checking in.
the cool thing about elite on the speccy though was that it had the bug where you could fly out of the space station, do a 180 turn, hyperspace and fly back in to the target. Made trading easy as properly docking was next to impossible. After you had your docking computer, it was fun...
Bad thing about Elite was the stupid lense lock.
My other fave games: Jet Set Willy (classic - poke 35899,0 - 23 years later i still remember it), Wheelie (already mentioned), Sabre Wulf.
But what it had over the C64 (which I had before the speccy) was that it had a decent basic. On the C64 you couldn't do anything graphical without machine language. Though because of the slowness I did eventually learn Z80 machine language.
I still have my Speccy with rubber keyboard, (which i later upgraded to a plus and then bought a 128K) - I even had a mouse for it...
Oh man.. That was a great computer.
POKE 35899,0 is the poke I also still most remember. Even 20 years later, wake me up in the middle of the night and ask me "How do you get infinite lives in Jet Set Willy" and I could tell you :-)
The neatest one liner:
FOR n=1 TO 80:CIRCLE n,n,n: NEXT n
The DevPac Assember was also cool.
Anyone remember the teach-it yourself programming course, where one issue came out every week called INPUT? I still have them.
My speccy setup:
Spectrum 48K (sometime along the line: upgraded to a Plus, then replaced with a 128K version)
Interface 1
Timex thermal printer
AMX Mouse
Microdrive
Epson FX80 with serial port.
I wrote most of my school assignments with Tasword 2, if I ever needed any artwork done, I fired up Artstudio...
Artsudio - it used a Lenslock.... I hated those damn things.. This was a piece of plastic with you put on the screen, pressed buttons until the box was as big as the piece of plastic, and then looking through the lenses, you could see two characters which you couldn't see without it.
3 wrong entries and you had to load the app from cassette again... 5 minutes wasted.
Jet Set Willy, Tasword 2, Artstudio, Elite, Attic Attack, Sabre Wolf.
I never really read Crash, because I was more into writing my own software rather than playing games, but but I never missed an issue of "Your Sinclair" - they had a cool style of writing and I also never missed "ZX Computing monthly" which focussed mainly on writing your own programs.
I had my dell laptop, 2 cell phones, my digital camera and had no problems.
They just asked me to remove the laptop and digital camera from my laptop carrying bag and x-rayed them seperately.
It was the first time that I was flying though that I had to take my shoes off to get them xrayed.
Wonder if they'll also do the same thing in Amsterdam when I fly back in several days.
The two trailers found were most likely mobile production plants for hydrogen for launching weather balloons.
See LA times story, which is mirrored in the following usenet article:
Link
OK, I learnt something new.
....
I did leave a 1% uncertainty - and I was in charge of testing Win2K, not NT.
So I know all the stuff that is in W2K FS, like the system databases, SFP files, sparse files, mount points, directory junctions, hard links, multiple file streams, SIS, data in remote storage,
Plus I did this 2 years ago as an intern.
I think that people would like and listen a lot more to you if you did not write in such an abusive way. Ever heard of netiquette?
NTFS5 (ie Windows 2000) is the first MS filesystem that offered a changejournal.
At least the backup vendor I work for only supports scanning for changes since the last full via Change Journal only for W2K. If change journal always existed, wy do not offer this feature for NT?
Having done a lot of work on W2K Filesystem 2 years ago (not programming, but testing), I am 99% sure that only NTFS5 and above support journaling.
Another way you can see this is when you pull out the plug, NT takes ages, W2K come up pretty fast again.
I like AIM. I really do. Its client for Linux is rather lacking, but a lot of people have it. It doesn't seem as bloated as ICQ, but it still has a lot of features. And you can bet just about anyone online has an AIM SN. The service is rather reliable, too, I've found.
:-D
I really do too. Me and a girl I met when I was in the US exchange a lot of pictures, and it is really neat that in AIM you can embed pictures into the text whereas in other IMs these have to be transferred seperately via files. Whereas with AIM you can post an image, and later when you read the text again, you still know which images you were talking about.
Also direct connects work through my linux NAT gateway, which I think is pretty cool. It only started doing this a few versions ago, before that I had to setup a SOCKS proxy for direct connects to work, but with newer versions, you just install and it works.
Also, AIM has the best smileys
gaim is pretty cool on my linux box, which I normally access from an LTSP box, but I prefer the original AIM client on my XP box, eventhough I know gaim exists for that too.
works for your own domain too now :-)
I feel guilty, I've recommended them in 3 posts so far in this thread - but I am really just a customer that loves the service. I am not Jeremy or Rob (who come from Australia).
I don't really want to advertise.
I have my own domain at namecheap (8.88 a year), nameservers for it at zoneedit.com because I like their dynip stuff and IPv6 support, and the MX records for it point to fastmail.fm.
I love it!!!! I have full control, reliable email, and I know the people that manage it belong to the most knowledgeable people about email on Earth (who else hacks around in IMAP code, writes white papers about why the Spamcop block list is flawed....)
Email is a lot more complex than people realise, and these people are just great, and they respond to you and you get to know them via the independant forum. Need a feature change? Ask them!!!
I agree, I have an enhanced account there.
Spam assassin and a sieve script takes care of spam permanently.
All my spam comes in via the gmx and university address I forward to it, but close to 100% of spam end up in my designated spam folders.
OK, it took me a while to fine tune spam scores together with spam assassin hit criteria to make it work 100% for me, but I love it sooo much!!!
I would recommend fastmail.fm to everyone, and I do not work for them.
OK, I did some research...
mysqlhotcopy I did not know about, but it only works for MyIsam tables.
For InnoDB tables there is a tool available:
InnoDB Hot Backup
http://www.innodb.com/hotbackup.html
What about PostgreSQL?
OK, let me explain how an online backup works:
For example the MS Exchange DB or MS SQL:
The database is put into "backup" mode, this means that all transactions do NOT get written to the actual database file, which can then be backed up. During this time, the database is still fully functional though, because all changes during this time get written to "patch files". So it is fully operational, just a little slower as it first has to check the "patch" files before checking the database files. And Database backups are mighty fast - like 35 Gig/hour or so.
Once the actual database has been copied, the database file is put out of backup mode and the patch file is also written to the backup media.
This is at least how it works for the backup vendor which I work for.
We do the same thing for Oracle.
The database stays fully functional (online) while we perform the backup.
This is what I mean by online backup.
As far as I know, both Postgres and MySql do not support online backups.
This makes it unusable for a lot of enterprises.
Also, many people here do not seem to be aware that MySQL with InnoDB tables can do commits/rollbacks and in the last C'T [German Computer magazine] there was an article about MySQL and ACID.
I may be wrong, I don't know that much about LVM, but my guess is with a LVM snapshot that you cannot perform incremental and differential backups?
Am I right? I really don't know.
remove the spaces in the link. Grrrr - wonder how that got in there.
You can't yet :-(
= /n ewsticker/data/tol-10.12.02-006/default.shtml&word s=Fastpath
But you will be able to soon, wait for the CeBit 2003.
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/result.xhtml?url
Sign up for an account somewhere that offers you an SMTP-Auth server. You can then send from any from address.
I thought that Bell Atlantic was much worse, when I lived in New Jersey for 6 months (now 2 years ago)
At least when DT charges the 50, you get equipment from them, often installed by them by an engineer. But Bell Atlantic, they charge you for something that is just an input in a computer:
Example: signing up for voicemail was a change in service that cost me $15 I think, together with an additional $10 to set up forwarding so that voicemail would even work.. I felt a bit ripped off, but on the other hand, I didn't use them to make any toll calls, so I guess they have to make money somewhere.
DT does (better did) not charge for setup fees for "virtual services" like Voicemail, Call Forwarding etc. And VM is a lot cheaper too (a year ago it was 1 Euro extra, if not included already in the service plan), and it also does faxes.
But sadly, they are starting to charge setup fees all over the place now too.
If you sign up for ISDN XXL+ DSL at 1und1.de for example, you get a simple ISDN PABX to which you can connect two analogue phones + one analogue "auxilary" device (answering machine, modem) for 9 Euros.
Other places offer similar deals.
Real ISDN phones are sadly expensive, but also very cool.
Still an Australian service, that is wher ethe main programmers sit.
Servers in NY, Norway and Texas.
Comparing German Web Mail Services to Hotmail would be considered an insult almost.
web.de and gmx.de both offer pop3 (web.de even IMAP in the free version), at least 10MB, filtering, and and and...
They are a LOT better than hotmail, but my favorite email service is an Australian one (fastmail.fm)
It's pretty straight forward.
Get The roaring penguin ppoe, that is what I use.
Username is a bit complex.
Basically, on your t-online password info sheet, you need to look for two things:
- Anschlußkennung
- T-Online Nummer
Both are nowerdays 12 digit numbers.
The username is these numbers written together plus the following string (Mitbenutzer Nummer)
#0001@t-online.de
so the whole string example is
123456789012123456789012#0001@t-online.de
That would be the username
The password is just the password.
Not many hassles really to get it to work.