I've heard that a number of other states have opt-out lists. Where can I find a good list of how to get on the list for each state?
I know that you can send a letter to the Direct Marketing Association to get on their do-not-call list, which applies to their members (i.e., the more reputable telemarketing companies).
Plan a slow transition. Microsoft is going to hit you with a deadline to buy into their subscription system. The deadline is that if you don't buy in by then, you have to pay full price for upgrades in the future. But you can ignore that since you'll be transitioning away from Microsoft instead of upgrading.
If you're lucky, your custom apps will run with Wine or can even be compiled with winelib to be native on Linux, even if they are a pain to port to real Linux apps.
If you find you can't effectively transition your apps, you can stick with Windows, but drop Office in favor of Star/Open Office. Even if you get stuck paying more for OS licensing, you'll save a huge bundle on the other licenses. If you do that, just be sure you're very careful with not letting unlicensed copies of MS Office onto your systems, or you'll be in big trouble if a BSA audit comes along.
Many devices actually support codes that the default remote will never send. The most common such codes are separate on/off codes.
Program via serial port: JP1
on
USB Remote Control
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
If you get a remote like the Radio Shack 2104 that has a 6-pin connector accessible from the battery compartment, you can build a serial cable and program it from your computer. This lets you program any button to do any function or sequence of functions.
There's an active discussion of these remotes at the JP1 Yahoo Group.
The situation in Turkey is in some ways similar to that of Iran. It is an Islamic country; 99.8% Muslim according to the CIA World Factbook. There are factions that want an Islamic government, while others want a secular government.
In a country like that, the secular government is going to have to produce laws that placate those that want to put the religious leaders in power.
I remember watching a show, probably on the Discovery Channel, about how many animals have weird senses. For example, some birds apparently see a spot at magnetic north and can use that for navigation. Turtles have some similar sense that they also use for navigation.
It's not hogwash at all. Sure, reptile brains may be simple in many ways, but that's not relevant. You don't have to be able to perform advanced trigonometry and calculus to figure out the trajectory of a thrown ball so that you can catch it. Instead, you get a sense for where the ball is going based on having seen balls thrown before.
Likewise, the alligator simply notices that certain patterns of pressure changes indicate that there is something in the water in a given direction.
Sure, you can describe what is going on with advanced mathematics, but the actual application is done with simple pattern matching.
What is collected is a list of all shows that have been recorded and what shows are scheduled to record. Essentially, this is the table of contents you see when selecting shows. The unit has to send this information back to SonicBlue's servers in order for the web-based my.replaytv.com service to work (which allows you to delete shows or schedule new recordings when the box next calls home).
What is presumably difficult to provide is a history of what was watched. Even more difficult would be to record a history of fast forwarding, automatic commercial advance, and manual 30-second skip usage.
Making things worse is that older units (like my 2020) are short on RAM, so any new code added to comply with court orders would have to be added at the expense of removing other features.
No, the Supreme Court has final jurisdiction, but every court issues rulings on Constitutional matters. Generally the Supreme Court only steps in when an appeals court gets it wrong.
So if the conclusions of this study are true, not only should we see life expectancy continue to rise, but we should be frequently setting new records for the oldest living human.
A few years ago, the oldest person in modern history died in France at an age something like 122. Will that record be 150 in a hundred years?
Unfortunately, accurate age information was not available for the general population until the previous century, so we don't really know what the change in that record has been for a statistically-valid period of time. (Besides, when looking at one in billions, it's hard to say you're being statistically valid.)
One shortcoming of the article is that the cause for the increase is not stated. Many causes for increasing life expectancy have no implications regarding a maximum lifespan. If all we're doing is reducing early deaths through improved vaccinations and safety, then we've made no progress in disproving the idea of a maximum lifespan.
Another way of looking at it would be: The life expectancy for people born today is higher than for people born twenty years ago. That doesn't mean that the life expectancy for people who are 60 today is any better than the life expectancy for people who were 60 twenty years ago.
Linux was never ported to the 486 and Pentium. As they support the same instruction set as the 386, no porting was necessary. Sure, over time enhancements were made to take advantage of specific features of various x86 features, but that's not porting.
And GNU has nothing to do with porting of Linux to any platform.
And your corporate mainframe doesn't run NT. Or if it does, you're using a definition of "mainframe" with which I was not previously familiar.
And preemptive multithreading and protected process management is not new to 2.4.5. That's something that has been in every Unix since, oh, about 1970. It's also something that has been in every enterprise-class system in the past twenty years. I would hardly call it a boon to admins.
What if you made a hollow sphere of aerogel? How large could you make it and still be structurally sound while containing a vacuum? Or perhaps fill it with Helium? Either way, you could make blocks that are lighter than air.
Dividends are stupid. If Microsoft decides it has more cash than it needs and wants to provide shareholder value with the money (possibly with the federal government threatening to tax the "excess" cash reserve), then a stock buy back makes much more sense than a dividend. In theory, both provide the same value to the shareholders, but a stock buyback provides capital gains instead of income.
So even if the government decided to enforce the tax on "excess" cash reserves, there would be no need for a dividend.
the other guest's ip address would not be interfered with, due to using the switch (which keeps channels separate so clients can't sniff each other's traffic).
Right, but the normal way I would think to set up a network would be to have a Linux box with two ethernet ports, one with a real IP address connected to the Internet, and one for the internal network. You then route all the internal addresses to the internal network and IP masquarade them out to the Internet. But the problem with multiple clients using the same IP addresses on the internal network (or having a conflict between a presumed gateway address and a client address) means that you have to totally rethink the normal strategy.
For this to work, you really have to manage packets based on the MAC address and assume that there aren't two machines that have cloned their MAC addresses. Unfortunately, most of the useful networking tools work at the IP level, not the ethernet level, so you would probably have to write a special IP stack to handle this. (The only ethernet-level tools besides sniffers that I know of are related to bridging or ARP.)
Of course, I expect you'll have very few complaints if you tell people to either use DHCP or 10.0.{floor}.{room} with 10.0.0.1 as the gateway. People who don't use don't use DHCP usually have half a clue. Still, it's an interesting problem.
Assuming you have a bunch of ports on a switch going to a single ethernet interface, what you described may not be possible. Assuming you're doing this in a hotel, what happens if guests in two different rooms have their laptops configured with the same static IP address? There's no way to distinguish between the two guests.
And what happens when one guest has a hard-coded gateway that happens to be the IP address of another guest?
Excluding those two possibilities, you just set up a normal IP masquarade system with a DHCP server, and IP aliasing on the internal ethernet port. You set up the routing for the internal network to include all private addresses, which should catch people with static IP addresses. You then watch for ARP reqeusts and assume that they're looking for a gateway, so you add an IP alias for that IP address to the internal ethernet port.
That should coveralmost everyone. There could be someone with a static non-internal IP number if their laptop is normally on a real network, but you could catch that and add the necessary route, though that's dangerous if someone sets up a static IP of 64.28.67.150 to hijack slashdot, so I would recommend against it.
Oh, and just for kicks you might want to look into supporting PPPoE connections for anyone who is normally connected via DSL.
Granted, I'm not a serious user of Word, but in my limited experience, RTF preserves all the formatting for most regular documents, and it works with word processors that don't handle Word files (like AppleWorks on my wife's old iMac).
I would love to have a filter that watches for Word documents, checks to see if they use any of the weird features that RTF doesn't support, and if not, converts them to RTF.
I hate the idea of a union for tech workers, but this is a case where unionizing may be the best bet. Even talking about unionizing may be enough to get some favorable changes.
Perhaps you should consider Walmart's Microtel PCs without Windows. Assuming you don't need software or monitors, you can get a 1GHz Celeron for $400. The trick is the legallity of transfering your Windows licenses (Which piece of the original computer does the license go with, the hard drive? Can you swap that piece into the new system). [Of course, if you could convert to Linux, that would be cool, but that's probably a separate battle.]
Oh, I had noticed the defects in film before, but I hadn't ever thought to watch for them. Now that I know there is an alternative, every glitch grates.
It's like watching VHS. I used to not think about how horrible the quality is. Now that I normally watch everyting on ReplayTV or DVD, the fuzziness of VHS is intollerable.
It's in the Natick Mall area of Route 9. I'm not sure about busses, but it's four or five miles from the Framingham commuter rail stop, and it's well past the end of the Green Line T trains. The Logan Express bus stop is in the same general area.
Unfortunately, you may find you really need a car to get there.
I saw the digital projection of The Phantom Menace in New Jersey, and was impressed. The picture was absolutely perfect. I'm not certain I would have noticed the difference if I hadn't been told, but ever since I've noticed film glitches in other movies--little flecks on a frame or dammage due to having been played too many times.
So this time it's 16 instead of 2. Hopefully in a few years it will become standard.
Yeah, I understand that point. It's like my desire to always run the latest version of everything or upgrade my hardware. At times that can be fun. At other times, it's a waste of time that only causes problems. When it comes to hardware upgrades, the question I always have to ask myself is, "What will this new hardware let me do that I can't do now?" Until I can answer that question, I can't justify spending money on it.
So while getting a system with a different architecture does have a cool geek factor to it, my point is that it doesn't let you do anything that you can't do with more common hardware. That may still be enough reason to do it, or it may not, but it's good to keep it in perspective.
Sure, you can get MIPS, SPARC, Alpha, PowerPC, StrongARM, or something even more esoteric, but what's the point? You'll end up running the same code, just compiled to a different processor. Despite the technical shortcomings of the X86, the processor can still run anything you can compile. Sure there are annoying BIOS issues. But when you come down to running real code, even most of the kernel code, it doesn't matter one bit what processor you have.
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard that a number of other states have opt-out lists. Where can I find a good list of how to get on the list for each state?
I know that you can send a letter to the Direct Marketing Association to get on their do-not-call list, which applies to their members (i.e., the more reputable telemarketing companies).
Plan a slow transition. Microsoft is going to hit you with a deadline to buy into their subscription system. The deadline is that if you don't buy in by then, you have to pay full price for upgrades in the future. But you can ignore that since you'll be transitioning away from Microsoft instead of upgrading.
If you're lucky, your custom apps will run with Wine or can even be compiled with winelib to be native on Linux, even if they are a pain to port to real Linux apps.
If you find you can't effectively transition your apps, you can stick with Windows, but drop Office in favor of Star/Open Office. Even if you get stuck paying more for OS licensing, you'll save a huge bundle on the other licenses. If you do that, just be sure you're very careful with not letting unlicensed copies of MS Office onto your systems, or you'll be in big trouble if a BSA audit comes along.
Many devices actually support codes that the default remote will never send. The most common such codes are separate on/off codes.
There's an active discussion of these remotes at the JP1 Yahoo Group.
...and has long been a member of NATO.
The situation in Turkey is in some ways similar to that of Iran. It is an Islamic country; 99.8% Muslim according to the CIA World Factbook. There are factions that want an Islamic government, while others want a secular government.
In a country like that, the secular government is going to have to produce laws that placate those that want to put the religious leaders in power.
I remember watching a show, probably on the Discovery Channel, about how many animals have weird senses. For example, some birds apparently see a spot at magnetic north and can use that for navigation. Turtles have some similar sense that they also use for navigation.
And we all know bats use sonar.
What other senses do animals have that we lack?
It's not hogwash at all. Sure, reptile brains may be simple in many ways, but that's not relevant. You don't have to be able to perform advanced trigonometry and calculus to figure out the trajectory of a thrown ball so that you can catch it. Instead, you get a sense for where the ball is going based on having seen balls thrown before.
Likewise, the alligator simply notices that certain patterns of pressure changes indicate that there is something in the water in a given direction.
Sure, you can describe what is going on with advanced mathematics, but the actual application is done with simple pattern matching.
What is collected is a list of all shows that have been recorded and what shows are scheduled to record. Essentially, this is the table of contents you see when selecting shows. The unit has to send this information back to SonicBlue's servers in order for the web-based my.replaytv.com service to work (which allows you to delete shows or schedule new recordings when the box next calls home).
What is presumably difficult to provide is a history of what was watched. Even more difficult would be to record a history of fast forwarding, automatic commercial advance, and manual 30-second skip usage.
Making things worse is that older units (like my 2020) are short on RAM, so any new code added to comply with court orders would have to be added at the expense of removing other features.
No, the Supreme Court has final jurisdiction, but every court issues rulings on Constitutional matters. Generally the Supreme Court only steps in when an appeals court gets it wrong.
So if the conclusions of this study are true, not only should we see life expectancy continue to rise, but we should be frequently setting new records for the oldest living human.
A few years ago, the oldest person in modern history died in France at an age something like 122. Will that record be 150 in a hundred years?
Unfortunately, accurate age information was not available for the general population until the previous century, so we don't really know what the change in that record has been for a statistically-valid period of time. (Besides, when looking at one in billions, it's hard to say you're being statistically valid.)
One shortcoming of the article is that the cause for the increase is not stated. Many causes for increasing life expectancy have no implications regarding a maximum lifespan. If all we're doing is reducing early deaths through improved vaccinations and safety, then we've made no progress in disproving the idea of a maximum lifespan.
Another way of looking at it would be: The life expectancy for people born today is higher than for people born twenty years ago. That doesn't mean that the life expectancy for people who are 60 today is any better than the life expectancy for people who were 60 twenty years ago.
Linux was never ported to the 486 and Pentium. As they support the same instruction set as the 386, no porting was necessary. Sure, over time enhancements were made to take advantage of specific features of various x86 features, but that's not porting.
And GNU has nothing to do with porting of Linux to any platform.
And your corporate mainframe doesn't run NT. Or if it does, you're using a definition of "mainframe" with which I was not previously familiar.
And preemptive multithreading and protected process management is not new to 2.4.5. That's something that has been in every Unix since, oh, about 1970. It's also something that has been in every enterprise-class system in the past twenty years. I would hardly call it a boon to admins.
What if you made a hollow sphere of aerogel? How large could you make it and still be structurally sound while containing a vacuum? Or perhaps fill it with Helium? Either way, you could make blocks that are lighter than air.
The engineering possibilities...
Dividends are stupid. If Microsoft decides it has more cash than it needs and wants to provide shareholder value with the money (possibly with the federal government threatening to tax the "excess" cash reserve), then a stock buy back makes much more sense than a dividend. In theory, both provide the same value to the shareholders, but a stock buyback provides capital gains instead of income.
So even if the government decided to enforce the tax on "excess" cash reserves, there would be no need for a dividend.
When a company goes into bankruptcy, a 'Q' gets appended to the end of the ticker symbol. HPQ. Hmmm.
the other guest's ip address would not be interfered with, due to using the switch (which keeps channels separate so clients can't sniff each other's traffic).
Right, but the normal way I would think to set up a network would be to have a Linux box with two ethernet ports, one with a real IP address connected to the Internet, and one for the internal network. You then route all the internal addresses to the internal network and IP masquarade them out to the Internet. But the problem with multiple clients using the same IP addresses on the internal network (or having a conflict between a presumed gateway address and a client address) means that you have to totally rethink the normal strategy.
For this to work, you really have to manage packets based on the MAC address and assume that there aren't two machines that have cloned their MAC addresses. Unfortunately, most of the useful networking tools work at the IP level, not the ethernet level, so you would probably have to write a special IP stack to handle this. (The only ethernet-level tools besides sniffers that I know of are related to bridging or ARP.)
Of course, I expect you'll have very few complaints if you tell people to either use DHCP or 10.0.{floor}.{room} with 10.0.0.1 as the gateway. People who don't use don't use DHCP usually have half a clue. Still, it's an interesting problem.
you obviously know something about networking
Thanks!
Assuming you have a bunch of ports on a switch going to a single ethernet interface, what you described may not be possible. Assuming you're doing this in a hotel, what happens if guests in two different rooms have their laptops configured with the same static IP address? There's no way to distinguish between the two guests.
And what happens when one guest has a hard-coded gateway that happens to be the IP address of another guest?
Excluding those two possibilities, you just set up a normal IP masquarade system with a DHCP server, and IP aliasing on the internal ethernet port. You set up the routing for the internal network to include all private addresses, which should catch people with static IP addresses. You then watch for ARP reqeusts and assume that they're looking for a gateway, so you add an IP alias for that IP address to the internal ethernet port.
That should coveralmost everyone. There could be someone with a static non-internal IP number if their laptop is normally on a real network, but you could catch that and add the necessary route, though that's dangerous if someone sets up a static IP of 64.28.67.150 to hijack slashdot, so I would recommend against it.
Oh, and just for kicks you might want to look into supporting PPPoE connections for anyone who is normally connected via DSL.
Granted, I'm not a serious user of Word, but in my limited experience, RTF preserves all the formatting for most regular documents, and it works with word processors that don't handle Word files (like AppleWorks on my wife's old iMac).
I would love to have a filter that watches for Word documents, checks to see if they use any of the weird features that RTF doesn't support, and if not, converts them to RTF.
(*) RTF: "Rich Text Format"
I hate the idea of a union for tech workers, but this is a case where unionizing may be the best bet. Even talking about unionizing may be enough to get some favorable changes.
Perhaps you should consider Walmart's Microtel PCs without Windows. Assuming you don't need software or monitors, you can get a 1GHz Celeron for $400. The trick is the legallity of transfering your Windows licenses (Which piece of the original computer does the license go with, the hard drive? Can you swap that piece into the new system). [Of course, if you could convert to Linux, that would be cool, but that's probably a separate battle.]
Oh, I had noticed the defects in film before, but I hadn't ever thought to watch for them. Now that I know there is an alternative, every glitch grates.
It's like watching VHS. I used to not think about how horrible the quality is. Now that I normally watch everyting on ReplayTV or DVD, the fuzziness of VHS is intollerable.
It's in the Natick Mall area of Route 9. I'm not sure about busses, but it's four or five miles from the Framingham commuter rail stop, and it's well past the end of the Green Line T trains. The Logan Express bus stop is in the same general area.
Unfortunately, you may find you really need a car to get there.
I saw the digital projection of The Phantom Menace in New Jersey, and was impressed. The picture was absolutely perfect. I'm not certain I would have noticed the difference if I hadn't been told, but ever since I've noticed film glitches in other movies--little flecks on a frame or dammage due to having been played too many times.
So this time it's 16 instead of 2. Hopefully in a few years it will become standard.
Yeah, I understand that point. It's like my desire to always run the latest version of everything or upgrade my hardware. At times that can be fun. At other times, it's a waste of time that only causes problems. When it comes to hardware upgrades, the question I always have to ask myself is, "What will this new hardware let me do that I can't do now?" Until I can answer that question, I can't justify spending money on it.
So while getting a system with a different architecture does have a cool geek factor to it, my point is that it doesn't let you do anything that you can't do with more common hardware. That may still be enough reason to do it, or it may not, but it's good to keep it in perspective.
Sure, you can get MIPS, SPARC, Alpha, PowerPC, StrongARM, or something even more esoteric, but what's the point? You'll end up running the same code, just compiled to a different processor. Despite the technical shortcomings of the X86, the processor can still run anything you can compile. Sure there are annoying BIOS issues. But when you come down to running real code, even most of the kernel code, it doesn't matter one bit what processor you have.