At least they still need a warrant to do this, right? right?
Assuming this applies:
Word of the FBI's new software comes on the heels of a major victory for the use of Carnivore. The USA Patriot Act, passed last month, made it a little easier for the bureau to deploy the software. Now agents can install it simply by obtaining an order from a U.S. or state attorney general -- without going to a judge. After-the-fact judicial oversight is still required.
No. That's... well, I'm not sure what that is, but it doesn't sound like a warrant to me.
So now and then I see a conspiracy theorist say that the government is suspicious of nonconformist OS users...
So what happens when it becomes virtually impossible to use M$ OSs for terrorism?
Right, it makes us alternate OS users look suspicious.
Mind you, I'm generally not that paranoid, but if you ever read the Washington Post check out today's (11/20) article about Bush's consolidation of executive power and think about his family *cough*dad's CIA*cough* and friends, and tell me it isn't a little worrisome.
iMac plastic is nowhere near invulnerable. I've cut apart a rev D (building a flat profile box with it after the monitor went bad) and played with the plastics. It's not that structurally solid. Three (but not two) foot drop with a brick dented it pretty bad, left small cracks.
The Graphite G4 case is another story. I'd gutted a box (I was doing some stuff with the MB and replacing most of the other parts with upgraded components) and accidentally knocked the case down a concrete stairwell. (Don't ask.) Went chasing after it (no power supply in it at that time, but I didn't want to lose the hinging case) and found it seemingly undamaged. Got curious, tried to damage one of the top "leg" loops by hanging the case by the loop over a steel strut and bringing a hammer, then a crowbar, then a sledge down on it. It ended up looking a bit scuffed, but...
I have a Quicksilver G4 at work. If anything, it seems to be made of tougher materials than the Graphite. I have no idea what the B&W is made of, but it looks and feels flimsier on close inspection than the later models.
I've also seen (not participated in) unscheduled stress tests on one of the colorful iBook models. I swear they are invincible when closed. Certainly, any laptop that survives getting bounced over a second story balcony by two scrapping little girls without any detectable issues (I don't understand how the HD survived!) deserves marks.
I'd be curious how the compact ice iBook would fare by comparison.
I've seen, on the other end of the spectrum, a compaq plastic minitower cave when a rather large guest of the owners sat on top of it. Did't damage the mobo, but the power supply got tweaked (the aluminum frame's top bent into it) and had to be replaced, as did the case and the CD-Rom (this was several years ago).
IANAP but i believe the oscillation of neutrinos refers to the theory that they switch forms as they travel through space.
I used to be a student of one of the American Physicists more heavilly involved in Super-K. Spent a lot of time learning this theory. You have it mostly right. They don't so much switch forms (transforming from one to another) as oscillate between mixed states. The particle in question ends up being, say, 90% electron neutrino (I'm pulling the numbers out of the air here), 8% mu neutrino, and 2% tau neutrino, in one of the theories. (Another one has a neutral charge neutrino in the mix too...) and the mixed state travels as a single packet of quantum potential. If it interacts at a particular time, the chances of the interaction being muon is X, electron being Y, etc. Except that if one of the neutrino types has mass, the packet is moving at a finite, though high, fraction of the speed of light, and the probability of interaction is affected by the phase of the different particles in the potential with respect to one another (which would be uniform if they were all massless and moving at the speed of light), and the phase is further affected by medium of transmission (matter versus vaccuum), which is why there is a statistical variation due to time of day and day of year... different distances traveled in different seasons, and different amount of matter traveled through. Course, although IUTBAP, IANCAP. This is from distant memory echoing through fog and cobwebs. YMMV.
I'd say it's mocking bad translations, not anything about the nipponese. My mom's AJA (I think she's Gosei or Rokusei depending on how you count it... lowest possible count would be Yonsei) and while the attitudes of those of us in Hawai'i toward the nipponese (and the Mainland American Japanese, for that matter) isn't exactly that of dislocated immigrants, we still maintain ties to Japan. Heck, I know several of the products on that web page. The little chocolate sticks are actually really good, and some of the weird coffee drinks are too. I still laugh my @$$ off at the translations. I also laugh at some of the butchery of written nihongo in airports here, though we make fewer attempts, however inellegant, to accomidate those who don't speak our language. It's not just from Japan. Ever try to interpret the translated documentation on taiwanese electronics? Or, for that matter, clothing care instructions from non-name italian manufacture? And the web site had the good grace to explain the mistranslation when they could. "Emergency Trap" as an accidental mixing of english and danish, for example... The only racist element was the "Engrish" bit, that I saw, and the truth is, that's a real issue. Just as English lacks some phonemes to properly handle certain foreign languages, nihongo lacks both the "la"/"el" sound and the "ra"/"er"/"air" (We have two terminal 'r' phonemes in english. Subtle, and most people are unaware of the difference.) sound, and the substitution of the çfamily phonemes has led to more than a few confusions in translations. Look at Mitsubishi's Starion. According to one popular myth, the proposed name was Stallion, and it was misunderstood... The validity of this is uncertain, but it is a possibility. Nissan for years went by the name "Datsun" in America. They thought it sounded english, and were trying to avoid the (then) stigma of being a japanese car company. Strangely, Americans thought it sounded Japanese. It sounds neither. I'm not sure what it sounds, but it's neither of the above.
What remains true, whatever you paint over it, is this: no two dissimilar languages match well, and less than fluent translation is, has always been, and will always be, funny. It's not racism, merely something that has been associated with racism. This isn't Krusty the Clown trying to figure out why no one is laughing at his buck-toothed "Me so solly" routine...
I have a few friends who are into anime. I like watching with them, and laughing at the toned (or dumbed) down subtitles... but I can't for the life of me think of a concise way to translate the concept of some of those trisylibic expressions into english. There's too much cultural context required. Likewise with some of the funny things on the web page in question, especially the drinks.
I understand the Japanese gist, and the english-speaking side of my brain still laughs.
Man, I just can't believe some techies out there. WTF do you do to have such disposable incomes? Or are you still burning through some foolish VCs wad?
Well, I for one am a very good programmer, worth what I earn, working for a company that does quality work and is in the black, because I bothered to make myself into an intelligent, highly skilled person instead of riding the dot-com bubble and hyping low-value skills to pipe-dreaming idiots. I avoided the dot-com gold rush, stuck to a sensible, though high, salary, and haven't spent huge amounts of money on unneeded luxuries. I have computers and consoles and a (27 inch) nice TV in the middle of a decent entertainment center and a living room equipped with surround sound, the cost of which is offset by the fact that some components are the property of my two roomies, who, like me, are young and college educated and have a realistic world view... I have a few other luxuries, which I only indulge in with forethought toward the costs. My kitchen is well equipped, as I am an amateur chef who could have gone pro if I wasn't a techie, and my bedroom has an assortment of very nice rosewood and mohagany furniture that I have purchased from estate sales and painstakingly restored, something I take great pleasure in. A tall chest contains a (very modest) collection of comics... I spend less than ten dollars a week on that habit... and there are two shelves (hand made, and shaped on my lathe) of books going around the top eighteen inches of my room. Most, though not all, of the books were purchased used, as I wear them out rereading them anyway. One wall only has one shelf, twice as tall, and it is stocked with hardcovers, programming references, and physics texts, which I do bother to read and reread to keep my skills from going stale. I keep other such "luxuries" around... a good set of weights and bench (and a gym membership, lifetime, 24 hour fitness), blades and outrigger canoeing gear and mountainclimbing gear, a cartoonist's drafting board (I used to be an editorial cartoonist) and artist's easel (hand carved, because they overcharge for the things otherwise), all of which I've made sure paid for themselves, one way or another... and I save away a lot of my income for the future. I don't buy sports cars or the latest fastest computer. I even take public transit as much as is reasonably convenient. My computers are good enough for my needs... ViaVoice and the latest Codewarrior and Office and Painter on the mac, which handles OS X just fine, and has benefited from a few upgrades using bare parts, and MSVS on the PC (Win2K), which is pretty low end, relatively, because it's not a primary machine, and a well souped up Linux box, without anything fancy for graphics, because I use it mostly for testing server apps... but most things I buy, I use for something that covers the cost, and then feel no guilt for hobby use in the aftermath. So what use the consoles? Not much, but someday I'm planning on entering the MMPOG development world with my own company (and ask the industry folks, my email will be familiar), and I like to know the capacities of potential target platforms. And besides, I've managed my life well, I have no debts and a good income, and I don't ever spend money I can't easilly afford. So in a few months, I may spend $200 on a Game Cube (no X-Box for now, not at $300) and a bit on some games...
And it won't come out of the money I'm slowly putting away to buy a property and build a house on it (or to build a house on the property that my grandfather owns on the north shore of oahu, and has told me he wants me to build on), or the money that I'm putting into retirement funds, or the emergency fund, or the emergency (for my family, eg parents and brother) fund, or the auto repair fund... no, it's coming out of the (much smaller) luxury fund. And that's WTF I have such disposable income. And you know what? If I ever decide that there's a woman worth partnering with, I'm prepared for the expenses that will entail. Not that I expect to find someone worthy who isn't as prepared for life as I am, but I take no chances. Why? I was a boy scout. I'm a skilled techie, and I'm very, very intelligent. I don't really care about being rich, just prepared. And my parents have set up a very decent life on much less income than I have, bought their own property and turned it from a baren plot of dirt and rock and scrubgrass to a seven figure valued estate on Maui, and provided well enough for my brother and myself (I paid for my own college, but they prepared me for life well enough that I could do so and succeed, and they, and I, are helping my brother through his), and I was fortunate enough to have their example to work from. And most of all, I'm sensible about life. I like to think that I picked up a bit of my grandparents' practicality, that got my mom's parents out of the third world plantations of Haleiwa and my dad's father through the pogroms of russia and his mother through a military career in the second world war. I like to think that I wasn't seduced by the empty dreams and easy promises of the me too credit card generation. Whatever the case, I also like to think that any competant programmer with a little restraint and a practical worldview could do the same... because whatever else you say about me, trust me, I did not "get lucky". I've dodged more bullets, by the skin of my teeth and the strength of my brains and body, than I care to think about, and not a one by luck alone. I've had nothing handed to me, inherited no money, fleeced no fools, and slept with no sugar mommies. I've given back, to my family, my communities, my friends, my teachers, in energy, in time, in money, in care. And when I choose to get a console or two as well as a computer, it is not a light whim to blow more cash, but it is not the heaviest decision I will make that day, either, because by not making such choices lightly, without thinking ahead, I've ensured that I can make them without significant consequence, save perhaps one less extravagant dinner party that month (so I'll prepare an indian or indonesian feast instead of french or pacific rim this friday... and the next few, why not? I learn as much practicing thai as tahitian, and the ingredients are cheaper... not that I don't find the best rates on even the highest quality ingredients, but still, foie gras and truffles or fresh vanilla beans and conch cost more than holy basil and kafir limes) and a little more time before my next luxury purchase, which I would probably have postponed anyway... actually, I think I've got five or six months worth of luxury fund sitting untouched right now, though I might use some of it for a trip to visit this girl I met (why are all the really interesting ones so far from home?) and possibly postpone the console (or not, I'd have plenty of money left in that fund...) for a few more months. Not like I'd play it that much (but an hour of unwinding a week is certainly worth a few hundred dollars...) with all the things I'm doing.
The price tag on that compiler. $499 per seat for the first few developers. For Windows. And another $499 for the Linux version. Added to the V$ cost. (And then there's the $5k for the Forte package to extract the sun C++ compiler, which requires hacks to automake and autoconf to switch on)
Guess who does the porting and profiling where I work...
Re:and people say windows is bloated
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Debian On DVD
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· Score: 2
MacOS 7.1 could be compressed to 1.1 MB. MacOS X can't fit in less than 180 MB (I've been trying to strip down a version of 10.1 for the hell of it) and MacOS 9.2 seems to be limited to 64 MB at the smallest functional...
I've got a bootable floppy with a bare 2.0.x linux kernel, but almost no drivers, and a fully bootable 20MB CD business card (rest of the space is diagnostic tools)...
So... which version of Windows can he trim down to 75MB?
Re:I'm buying one purely for the tiny firewire hd
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Yup, I was looking at that very drive originally. But I don't need that much space on it, and the price for the cheapest (10GB) I've found is already $250... $370 for the 30GB, and the 48GB is around $700... also, the LaCie seems to have a somewhat larger footprint (27x87x143mm vs 20x62x102mm) and the smaller the better with this one. All in all, though, the LaCie looked good, and before this announcement, I was all but ready to order one.
I'm buying one purely for the tiny firewire hd
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Apple releases iPod
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I need a fast, really small, 3GB+ hard drive, for software project transfers. This will do nicely, I think. Back in the day (early 90s) I used to use something called a Pocket Rocket, a SCSI HD about the size of a TV remote. When it comes to stuff that, for size reasons, really needs to be sneakernetted, this is the ideal solution. Any songs that I want to listen to can fit in the remaining 2GB with ease...
I've found one little feature of this device that might actually convince me to get one. It's got a rather fast read and write speed, and it can hold things other than mp3s... which means it's a really, really small portable 5GB firewire HD, and I actually need one of those for transfering large software projects from mac to mac without dying over the DSL line... broadband is OK, but it's not fast networking. Given how long and tedious it is to burn three CDs with the latest version of the project, or to do reliable diffing across the whole thing, and the fact that this is more portable than the CDs... and add the bonus of having the music, and I might go for it.
The peruvian purple potato you had is a common enough variety. You can obtain it in any specialty supermarket or produce market, or from a restaurant wholesaler. I moonlight as a chef - just designing the recipies, locating suppliers, training cooks and procurers, that sort of thing - so I spend a lot of time studying these things. The purple potatoes you refer to have been around for a lot longer than GM foods. So have gold, black, and pale blue/periwinkle toned potatoes. I know of one with a pinkish flesh tone and a slightly creamy-sweet flavor. There are also purple sweet potatoes (Okinawa, the southernmost island of Japan, with a slightly different culture and cousine) that have a wonderfully rich flavor, and purple yams (the real thing, not the sweet potato that gets sold as a yam in american supermarkets) in Thailand, which are grated and used for deserts. Some of these foods have a bright enough purple to look purely synthetic, and some have a beautiful lavender hue. Just because the color is odd is no reason to dismiss the food.
The thing to remember about GM foods is, many of them are really no more extreme in result than a few decades of cross breeding. Traits from on subspecies are imported into another - disease resistance, productivity, flavor, sweetness - without the intermediate stage of weeding out failures. Others are the result of importing animal genes, and these might have unexpected consequences, and should be more rigorously tested. I'd worry most about the ones with chemical pesticide production engineered in, not the disease resistant ones.
Of course, plants engineered to sterilize their non-GM competitors (Hey, Joe-Bob, what happened to your farm? - Oh, hi Bob-Joe, that GM wheat wiped my seed out for this year and I went under...) are a real worry... reducing the number of food crops to a few genomes is really hazardous to our viability.
Rebuttal? Not exactly. Parody, more like. I didn't really think the parent post was in any way as unbiased, intelligent, or journalistic as its author seemed to feel, and responded with a post done in the same style, with a somewhat contradictory quote, and a similarly styled insult. Truth is, the previous poster stayed just on the side of fact, by a fingernail, and that's not a style I care to respond to in a debate. I'd much rather respond by satirizing the responsible punter... As far as it goes, the little quote I quoted made it abundantly clear that Bush's administration (and probably Bush, or at least his VP and cabinet) had a direct hand in the decision, but didn't want to directly accept political responsibility... as clear as the NY Times quote made it that it *wasn't* an administration decision... which leaves a the conclusion that not only did the Bush camp instruct the DOJ on their decision, but they also told them not to blab about those instructions. Not that that's anything noteworthy, but I don't think, even if my parody were taken as a rebuttal, that it would be the miserable failure you seem to feel it was. It didn't prove that the/. conclusion ("Bush did it!") was valid... but it did prove that the "there's no evidence whatsoever" reaction was _not_ valid...
WASHINGTON -- Reversing a Clinton-era legal strategy, the Bush administration announced today it will no longer seek the breakup of Microsoft and wants to end the historic antitrust case against the software maker as quickly as possible.
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During a ceremony on the White House lawn, President Bush declined to comment directly on the case but told reporters: "During the course of the campaign and throughout my administration I have made it abundantly clear that on issues relating to lawsuits -- to ongoing lawsuits -- that I expect the Justice Department to handle that in a way that brings honor and thought to the process.
"I respect and hold our attorney general in high esteem and I honor the work that he's done and I'm going to leave it at that," Bush said.
Now you might speculate that they're taking the quote out of context, or that there might be another implication to what he said (or almost didn't say), but to only go from one source and ignore all others is clearly very poor investigation.
The second issue of duplicate file names can be solved easily too...don't allow it. In other words DumbName.jpg and DumbName.txt should not be allowed in the same folder. Then hide all the file extensions and the users would be none the wiser.
Oooh, yeah. Here goes me...
Create file: BaseClass.cpp Create file: BaseClass.h That file already exists, choose another name. me: WTF?!
I generally use a source and header directory (file) differentiation, but not when it's a quick and dirty proof of concept test...
I did my undergraduate work at the University of Hawai'i. Ended up the sole student in a supervised senior survey in particle physics/cosmology with him, my last semester. Quite good, but required an extreme degree of self-direction. Given the rest of the university, it's amazing that UH has such a decent physics program.
The Yahoo (and to a lesser degree, the NYT) article was terribly dismissive of the results from the Super Kamiokande experiment, which had reduced the possibilities to two types of neutrino interaction - to-sterile neutrino oscillation, or to-tau/mu neutrinos... and made the sterile option terribly unlikely. This isn't an utterly new, wow-we-never-suspected sort of discovery - just a refinement of the data. More people (physicists) will find it credible, the degree of certainty has massively increased - but this isn't on scale with the confirmed discovery of a new particle. "We've solved a 30-year-old puzzle of the missing neutrinos of the Sun," the article quotes. Well, perhaps, but like the announcement from the Super-K (there was a huge, boastful quote from my dear old particle physics prof John Learned that was all over the papers), this is mostly hype. Still, got to keep yourself stimulated if you want to survive in academia...
"Deregulation" never happened in California. Price controls and massive bureaucratic obstacles to producing and selling power happened.
>sputter I'd like to know what you define legislative mandates (under the last Republican Gov, but delayed as a time bomb that that ineffectual loser Davis couldn't even see until it had not only exploded under him, but proceeded to shower the atmosphere with sun-killing radioactive dust - sorry, got lost in the metaphor) to force state power utilities to sell plants off to *unsupervised* companies eager to underbid on them and then overcharge for selling back power *generated by plants originally built by the state* but now owned by companies *including one of the biggest private funders of the Bush/Cheyney campaign* and under investigation for suspected collusion and conspiracy to artificially inflate shortages to increase profits.
Not sure if this is the same thing, but there is a showroom in North Hollywood/Eagle Rock/Glendale somewhere that I passed full of these two front tire, one rear tire bubble shaped one seaters. Looked like they were selling Pontiacs from the same dealership, but maybe I was mistaken. Looks very similar, like a nose without a face, some minor differences in paint and shape in my memory. I couldn't help remembering the "Speck" rental car from that McDonalds (or was it Burger King?) commercial for supersized fat-bomb meals. Mind, I plead guilty to currently being in the market for a new truck (not the biggest, but still under 20 mpg) to replace my older V6 Camry (also well under 20 mpg), in spite of being a big fan (in theory) of these hybrid cars. (If the Prius sold closer to a low end Camry / high end Corolla, I'd be more tempted. I ran the numbers, and it would take about nine years, at my driving rates, to make up the cost differential compared to a similarly outfitted gasoline model, even with savings... and it's an untested engine. Never buy first generation.)
Not quite accurate. I never "learned" asm, but I have found, on any given architecture, that I can read it, hack it, and even find bugs on occasion. Why? Because I understand how the hardware works. I'm fluent in many languages, though only a handful professionally, but honestly, I'm fluent in approaches to instructing machines in what I want them to do. I'm not a programmer by training - my degree is in physics - but I do believe that I'm a better programmer because I understand the hardware, and the OOD, and the Interface Design, and so on...
India had several cultures. It was a shifting set of political, cultural, and religious boundaries for centuries. At one time, about 4500 years ago, India was home to the first literate civilization to recognize parallel (hence egalitarian) male and female gender roles. I had thought there was still a pocket of this in the North-Western region of the subcontinent, but I haven't been able to find any corroborating documentation. I'm going to have to put this down as an I-Was-Mistaken, unless I can dig that up.
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming this applies:
No. That's... well, I'm not sure what that is, but it doesn't sound like a warrant to me.
So now and then I see a conspiracy theorist say that the government is suspicious of nonconformist OS users...
So what happens when it becomes virtually impossible to use M$ OSs for terrorism?
Right, it makes us alternate OS users look suspicious.
Mind you, I'm generally not that paranoid, but if you ever read the Washington Post check out today's (11/20) article about Bush's consolidation of executive power and think about his family *cough*dad's CIA*cough* and friends, and tell me it isn't a little worrisome.
Not sure about bulletproofing here, but...
iMac plastic is nowhere near invulnerable. I've cut apart a rev D (building a flat profile box with it after the monitor went bad) and played with the plastics. It's not that structurally solid. Three (but not two) foot drop with a brick dented it pretty bad, left small cracks.
The Graphite G4 case is another story. I'd gutted a box (I was doing some stuff with the MB and replacing most of the other parts with upgraded components) and accidentally knocked the case down a concrete stairwell. (Don't ask.) Went chasing after it (no power supply in it at that time, but I didn't want to lose the hinging case) and found it seemingly undamaged. Got curious, tried to damage one of the top "leg" loops by hanging the case by the loop over a steel strut and bringing a hammer, then a crowbar, then a sledge down on it. It ended up looking a bit scuffed, but...
I have a Quicksilver G4 at work. If anything, it seems to be made of tougher materials than the Graphite. I have no idea what the B&W is made of, but it looks and feels flimsier on close inspection than the later models.
I've also seen (not participated in) unscheduled stress tests on one of the colorful iBook models. I swear they are invincible when closed. Certainly, any laptop that survives getting bounced over a second story balcony by two scrapping little girls without any detectable issues (I don't understand how the HD survived!) deserves marks.
I'd be curious how the compact ice iBook would fare by comparison.
I've seen, on the other end of the spectrum, a compaq plastic minitower cave when a rather large guest of the owners sat on top of it. Did't damage the mobo, but the power supply got tweaked (the aluminum frame's top bent into it) and had to be replaced, as did the case and the CD-Rom (this was several years ago).
I used to be a student of one of the American Physicists more heavilly involved in Super-K. Spent a lot of time learning this theory. You have it mostly right. They don't so much switch forms (transforming from one to another) as oscillate between mixed states. The particle in question ends up being, say, 90% electron neutrino (I'm pulling the numbers out of the air here), 8% mu neutrino, and 2% tau neutrino, in one of the theories. (Another one has a neutral charge neutrino in the mix too...) and the mixed state travels as a single packet of quantum potential. If it interacts at a particular time, the chances of the interaction being muon is X, electron being Y, etc. Except that if one of the neutrino types has mass, the packet is moving at a finite, though high, fraction of the speed of light, and the probability of interaction is affected by the phase of the different particles in the potential with respect to one another (which would be uniform if they were all massless and moving at the speed of light), and the phase is further affected by medium of transmission (matter versus vaccuum), which is why there is a statistical variation due to time of day and day of year... different distances traveled in different seasons, and different amount of matter traveled through. Course, although IUTBAP, IANCAP. This is from distant memory echoing through fog and cobwebs. YMMV.
I'd say it's mocking bad translations, not anything about the nipponese. My mom's AJA (I think she's Gosei or Rokusei depending on how you count it... lowest possible count would be Yonsei) and while the attitudes of those of us in Hawai'i toward the nipponese (and the Mainland American Japanese, for that matter) isn't exactly that of dislocated immigrants, we still maintain ties to Japan. Heck, I know several of the products on that web page. The little chocolate sticks are actually really good, and some of the weird coffee drinks are too. I still laugh my @$$ off at the translations. I also laugh at some of the butchery of written nihongo in airports here, though we make fewer attempts, however inellegant, to accomidate those who don't speak our language. It's not just from Japan. Ever try to interpret the translated documentation on taiwanese electronics? Or, for that matter, clothing care instructions from non-name italian manufacture? And the web site had the good grace to explain the mistranslation when they could. "Emergency Trap" as an accidental mixing of english and danish, for example... The only racist element was the "Engrish" bit, that I saw, and the truth is, that's a real issue. Just as English lacks some phonemes to properly handle certain foreign languages, nihongo lacks both the "la"/"el" sound and the "ra"/"er"/"air" (We have two terminal 'r' phonemes in english. Subtle, and most people are unaware of the difference.) sound, and the substitution of the çfamily phonemes has led to more than a few confusions in translations. Look at Mitsubishi's Starion. According to one popular myth, the proposed name was Stallion, and it was misunderstood... The validity of this is uncertain, but it is a possibility. Nissan for years went by the name "Datsun" in America. They thought it sounded english, and were trying to avoid the (then) stigma of being a japanese car company. Strangely, Americans thought it sounded Japanese. It sounds neither. I'm not sure what it sounds, but it's neither of the above.
What remains true, whatever you paint over it, is this: no two dissimilar languages match well, and less than fluent translation is, has always been, and will always be, funny. It's not racism, merely something that has been associated with racism. This isn't Krusty the Clown trying to figure out why no one is laughing at his buck-toothed "Me so solly" routine...
I have a few friends who are into anime. I like watching with them, and laughing at the toned (or dumbed) down subtitles... but I can't for the life of me think of a concise way to translate the concept of some of those trisylibic expressions into english. There's too much cultural context required. Likewise with some of the funny things on the web page in question, especially the drinks.
I understand the Japanese gist, and the english-speaking side of my brain still laughs.
Well, I for one am a very good programmer, worth what I earn, working for a company that does quality work and is in the black, because I bothered to make myself into an intelligent, highly skilled person instead of riding the dot-com bubble and hyping low-value skills to pipe-dreaming idiots. I avoided the dot-com gold rush, stuck to a sensible, though high, salary, and haven't spent huge amounts of money on unneeded luxuries. I have computers and consoles and a (27 inch) nice TV in the middle of a decent entertainment center and a living room equipped with surround sound, the cost of which is offset by the fact that some components are the property of my two roomies, who, like me, are young and college educated and have a realistic world view... I have a few other luxuries, which I only indulge in with forethought toward the costs. My kitchen is well equipped, as I am an amateur chef who could have gone pro if I wasn't a techie, and my bedroom has an assortment of very nice rosewood and mohagany furniture that I have purchased from estate sales and painstakingly restored, something I take great pleasure in. A tall chest contains a (very modest) collection of comics... I spend less than ten dollars a week on that habit... and there are two shelves (hand made, and shaped on my lathe) of books going around the top eighteen inches of my room. Most, though not all, of the books were purchased used, as I wear them out rereading them anyway. One wall only has one shelf, twice as tall, and it is stocked with hardcovers, programming references, and physics texts, which I do bother to read and reread to keep my skills from going stale. I keep other such "luxuries" around... a good set of weights and bench (and a gym membership, lifetime, 24 hour fitness), blades and outrigger canoeing gear and mountainclimbing gear, a cartoonist's drafting board (I used to be an editorial cartoonist) and artist's easel (hand carved, because they overcharge for the things otherwise), all of which I've made sure paid for themselves, one way or another... and I save away a lot of my income for the future. I don't buy sports cars or the latest fastest computer. I even take public transit as much as is reasonably convenient. My computers are good enough for my needs... ViaVoice and the latest Codewarrior and Office and Painter on the mac, which handles OS X just fine, and has benefited from a few upgrades using bare parts, and MSVS on the PC (Win2K), which is pretty low end, relatively, because it's not a primary machine, and a well souped up Linux box, without anything fancy for graphics, because I use it mostly for testing server apps... but most things I buy, I use for something that covers the cost, and then feel no guilt for hobby use in the aftermath. So what use the consoles? Not much, but someday I'm planning on entering the MMPOG development world with my own company (and ask the industry folks, my email will be familiar), and I like to know the capacities of potential target platforms. And besides, I've managed my life well, I have no debts and a good income, and I don't ever spend money I can't easilly afford. So in a few months, I may spend $200 on a Game Cube (no X-Box for now, not at $300) and a bit on some games...
And it won't come out of the money I'm slowly putting away to buy a property and build a house on it (or to build a house on the property that my grandfather owns on the north shore of oahu, and has told me he wants me to build on), or the money that I'm putting into retirement funds, or the emergency fund, or the emergency (for my family, eg parents and brother) fund, or the auto repair fund... no, it's coming out of the (much smaller) luxury fund. And that's WTF I have such disposable income. And you know what? If I ever decide that there's a woman worth partnering with, I'm prepared for the expenses that will entail. Not that I expect to find someone worthy who isn't as prepared for life as I am, but I take no chances. Why? I was a boy scout. I'm a skilled techie, and I'm very, very intelligent. I don't really care about being rich, just prepared. And my parents have set up a very decent life on much less income than I have, bought their own property and turned it from a baren plot of dirt and rock and scrubgrass to a seven figure valued estate on Maui, and provided well enough for my brother and myself (I paid for my own college, but they prepared me for life well enough that I could do so and succeed, and they, and I, are helping my brother through his), and I was fortunate enough to have their example to work from. And most of all, I'm sensible about life. I like to think that I picked up a bit of my grandparents' practicality, that got my mom's parents out of the third world plantations of Haleiwa and my dad's father through the pogroms of russia and his mother through a military career in the second world war. I like to think that I wasn't seduced by the empty dreams and easy promises of the me too credit card generation. Whatever the case, I also like to think that any competant programmer with a little restraint and a practical worldview could do the same... because whatever else you say about me, trust me, I did not "get lucky". I've dodged more bullets, by the skin of my teeth and the strength of my brains and body, than I care to think about, and not a one by luck alone. I've had nothing handed to me, inherited no money, fleeced no fools, and slept with no sugar mommies. I've given back, to my family, my communities, my friends, my teachers, in energy, in time, in money, in care. And when I choose to get a console or two as well as a computer, it is not a light whim to blow more cash, but it is not the heaviest decision I will make that day, either, because by not making such choices lightly, without thinking ahead, I've ensured that I can make them without significant consequence, save perhaps one less extravagant dinner party that month (so I'll prepare an indian or indonesian feast instead of french or pacific rim this friday... and the next few, why not? I learn as much practicing thai as tahitian, and the ingredients are cheaper... not that I don't find the best rates on even the highest quality ingredients, but still, foie gras and truffles or fresh vanilla beans and conch cost more than holy basil and kafir limes) and a little more time before my next luxury purchase, which I would probably have postponed anyway... actually, I think I've got five or six months worth of luxury fund sitting untouched right now, though I might use some of it for a trip to visit this girl I met (why are all the really interesting ones so far from home?) and possibly postpone the console (or not, I'd have plenty of money left in that fund...) for a few more months. Not like I'd play it that much (but an hour of unwinding a week is certainly worth a few hundred dollars...) with all the things I'm doing.
The price tag on that compiler. $499 per seat for the first few developers. For Windows. And another $499 for the Linux version. Added to the V$ cost. (And then there's the $5k for the Forte package to extract the sun C++ compiler, which requires hacks to automake and autoconf to switch on)
Guess who does the porting and profiling where I work...
MacOS 7.1 could be compressed to 1.1 MB. MacOS X can't fit in less than 180 MB (I've been trying to strip down a version of 10.1 for the hell of it) and MacOS 9.2 seems to be limited to 64 MB at the smallest functional...
' mn otsurewhatbutit'sreallynotaddingup
I've got a bootable floppy with a bare 2.0.x linux kernel, but almost no drivers, and a fully bootable 20MB CD business card (rest of the space is diagnostic tools)...
So... which version of Windows can he trim down to 75MB?
muttermutterbloodybloatwaresomethingswronghereI
Yup, I was looking at that very drive originally. But I don't need that much space on it, and the price for the cheapest (10GB) I've found is already $250... $370 for the 30GB, and the 48GB is around $700... also, the LaCie seems to have a somewhat larger footprint (27x87x143mm vs 20x62x102mm) and the smaller the better with this one. All in all, though, the LaCie looked good, and before this announcement, I was all but ready to order one.
I need a fast, really small, 3GB+ hard drive, for software project transfers. This will do nicely, I think. Back in the day (early 90s) I used to use something called a Pocket Rocket, a SCSI HD about the size of a TV remote. When it comes to stuff that, for size reasons, really needs to be sneakernetted, this is the ideal solution. Any songs that I want to listen to can fit in the remaining 2GB with ease...
I've found one little feature of this device that might actually convince me to get one. It's got a rather fast read and write speed, and it can hold things other than mp3s... which means it's a really, really small portable 5GB firewire HD, and I actually need one of those for transfering large software projects from mac to mac without dying over the DSL line... broadband is OK, but it's not fast networking. Given how long and tedious it is to burn three CDs with the latest version of the project, or to do reliable diffing across the whole thing, and the fact that this is more portable than the CDs... and add the bonus of having the music, and I might go for it.
Several news (not rumor) sites are claiming that Apple has announced the "iPod", a sort of mp3 player with HD...
Rumors nothing!
Start trying it now...
Test Drive Word X
The peruvian purple potato you had is a common enough variety. You can obtain it in any specialty supermarket or produce market, or from a restaurant wholesaler. I moonlight as a chef - just designing the recipies, locating suppliers, training cooks and procurers, that sort of thing - so I spend a lot of time studying these things. The purple potatoes you refer to have been around for a lot longer than GM foods. So have gold, black, and pale blue/periwinkle toned potatoes. I know of one with a pinkish flesh tone and a slightly creamy-sweet flavor. There are also purple sweet potatoes (Okinawa, the southernmost island of Japan, with a slightly different culture and cousine) that have a wonderfully rich flavor, and purple yams (the real thing, not the sweet potato that gets sold as a yam in american supermarkets) in Thailand, which are grated and used for deserts. Some of these foods have a bright enough purple to look purely synthetic, and some have a beautiful lavender hue. Just because the color is odd is no reason to dismiss the food.
The thing to remember about GM foods is, many of them are really no more extreme in result than a few decades of cross breeding. Traits from on subspecies are imported into another - disease resistance, productivity, flavor, sweetness - without the intermediate stage of weeding out failures. Others are the result of importing animal genes, and these might have unexpected consequences, and should be more rigorously tested. I'd worry most about the ones with chemical pesticide production engineered in, not the disease resistant ones.
Of course, plants engineered to sterilize their non-GM competitors (Hey, Joe-Bob, what happened to your farm? - Oh, hi Bob-Joe, that GM wheat wiped my seed out for this year and I went under...) are a real worry... reducing the number of food crops to a few genomes is really hazardous to our viability.
Does that CPU really have PPC, 486x3, and 68030 ALL written on it's ID? Weird...
Rebuttal? Not exactly. Parody, more like. I didn't really think the parent post was in any way as unbiased, intelligent, or journalistic as its author seemed to feel, and responded with a post done in the same style, with a somewhat contradictory quote, and a similarly styled insult. Truth is, the previous poster stayed just on the side of fact, by a fingernail, and that's not a style I care to respond to in a debate. I'd much rather respond by satirizing the responsible punter... As far as it goes, the little quote I quoted made it abundantly clear that Bush's administration (and probably Bush, or at least his VP and cabinet) had a direct hand in the decision, but didn't want to directly accept political responsibility... as clear as the NY Times quote made it that it *wasn't* an administration decision... which leaves a the conclusion that not only did the Bush camp instruct the DOJ on their decision, but they also told them not to blab about those instructions. Not that that's anything noteworthy, but I don't think, even if my parody were taken as a rebuttal, that it would be the miserable failure you seem to feel it was. It didn't prove that the /. conclusion ("Bush did it!") was valid... but it did prove that the "there's no evidence whatsoever" reaction was _not_ valid...
Now you might speculate that they're taking the quote out of context, or that there might be another implication to what he said (or almost didn't say), but to only go from one source and ignore all others is clearly very poor investigation.
The second issue of duplicate file names can be solved easily too...don't allow it. In other words DumbName.jpg and DumbName.txt should not be allowed in the same folder. Then hide all the file extensions and the users would be none the wiser.
Oooh, yeah. Here goes me...
Create file: BaseClass.cpp
Create file: BaseClass.h
That file already exists, choose another name.
me: WTF?!
I generally use a source and header directory (file) differentiation, but not when it's a quick and dirty proof of concept test...
Think the handful of Robotech II: The Sentinels eps they actually produced will be DVD'd as well?
I did my undergraduate work at the University of Hawai'i. Ended up the sole student in a supervised senior survey in particle physics/cosmology with him, my last semester. Quite good, but required an extreme degree of self-direction. Given the rest of the university, it's amazing that UH has such a decent physics program.
Where were you doing SKAT work?
The Yahoo (and to a lesser degree, the NYT) article was terribly dismissive of the results from the Super Kamiokande experiment, which had reduced the possibilities to two types of neutrino interaction - to-sterile neutrino oscillation, or to-tau/mu neutrinos... and made the sterile option terribly unlikely. This isn't an utterly new, wow-we-never-suspected sort of discovery - just a refinement of the data. More people (physicists) will find it credible, the degree of certainty has massively increased - but this isn't on scale with the confirmed discovery of a new particle. "We've solved a 30-year-old puzzle of the missing neutrinos of the Sun," the article quotes. Well, perhaps, but like the announcement from the Super-K (there was a huge, boastful quote from my dear old particle physics prof John Learned that was all over the papers), this is mostly hype. Still, got to keep yourself stimulated if you want to survive in academia...
"Deregulation" never happened in California. Price controls and massive bureaucratic obstacles to producing and selling power happened.
>sputter I'd like to know what you define legislative mandates (under the last Republican Gov, but delayed as a time bomb that that ineffectual loser Davis couldn't even see until it had not only exploded under him, but proceeded to shower the atmosphere with sun-killing radioactive dust - sorry, got lost in the metaphor) to force state power utilities to sell plants off to *unsupervised* companies eager to underbid on them and then overcharge for selling back power *generated by plants originally built by the state* but now owned by companies *including one of the biggest private funders of the Bush/Cheyney campaign* and under investigation for suspected collusion and conspiracy to artificially inflate shortages to increase profits.
Not sure if this is the same thing, but there is a showroom in North Hollywood/Eagle Rock/Glendale somewhere that I passed full of these two front tire, one rear tire bubble shaped one seaters. Looked like they were selling Pontiacs from the same dealership, but maybe I was mistaken. Looks very similar, like a nose without a face, some minor differences in paint and shape in my memory. I couldn't help remembering the "Speck" rental car from that McDonalds (or was it Burger King?) commercial for supersized fat-bomb meals. Mind, I plead guilty to currently being in the market for a new truck (not the biggest, but still under 20 mpg) to replace my older V6 Camry (also well under 20 mpg), in spite of being a big fan (in theory) of these hybrid cars. (If the Prius sold closer to a low end Camry / high end Corolla, I'd be more tempted. I ran the numbers, and it would take about nine years, at my driving rates, to make up the cost differential compared to a similarly outfitted gasoline model, even with savings... and it's an untested engine. Never buy first generation.)
Not quite accurate. I never "learned" asm, but I have found, on any given architecture, that I can read it, hack it, and even find bugs on occasion. Why? Because I understand how the hardware works. I'm fluent in many languages, though only a handful professionally, but honestly, I'm fluent in approaches to instructing machines in what I want them to do. I'm not a programmer by training - my degree is in physics - but I do believe that I'm a better programmer because I understand the hardware, and the OOD, and the Interface Design, and so on...
India had several cultures. It was a shifting set of political, cultural, and religious boundaries for centuries. At one time, about 4500 years ago, India was home to the first literate civilization to recognize parallel (hence egalitarian) male and female gender roles. I had thought there was still a pocket of this in the North-Western region of the subcontinent, but I haven't been able to find any corroborating documentation. I'm going to have to put this down as an I-Was-Mistaken, unless I can dig that up.