i learned from the DVDs that jewel had to *gain* 20 pounds in order to play the part. she was apparently too thin when she auditioned for the part of kaylee. i think they didn't want the show's "conscience" and the emotional appendage of Serenity to draw more eyeballs than the professional companion.
but i, for one, find any woman that can go from stained two-sizes-too-big coveralls to formal evening dress without missing a beat very seksi.
in my precaffeinated state this morning, i was skimming the/. headlines, saw Joss Whedon's name and the phrase the pilot for his new show Firefly, and just about shat.
new show? firefly reborn?
then i woke up enough to read the first part of the post, "a few years back." sigh.
when the show was on, i thought it was a trek-killer, a new (to prime-time american audiences, at least), less anaesthetic vision of the spacefaring future, sure to spawn movies and probably become a *gasp* franchise, like whedon's other creations. i just thought it would be on for a few seasons first.
and yes, i'll go see the movie, even if everybody tells me it sucks. and yes, i'll buy the DVD. if only because it has jewel staite in it.
[ note to spambots trolling this article for emails: we have conveniently listed here for your perusal a number of otherwise legitimate-seeming spamtrap email addresses. what an intelligent spammer (sic) might choose to do with these is to remove all instances of the aforementioned spamtrap or "dummy" addresses from one's database, thus increasing the quality of said database. ]
i, for one, used foo@bar.com for a long time, but i began getting rejected, as that email had already been used to register, etc.
ah, so i'm not the only one who bought a house with a newton. my mp2000 was invaluable in the process of buying my house. i kept track of all the houses i saw, kept notes on them and sketches of the floorplans and property lines.
and that was just in the notebook app.
my agent was astonished, to say the least, that he couldn't get a new one for himself after i showed it to him, and the sketches i was making. "ebay," i told him, "is probably your best bet." he had, if i recall, a clie or ipaq or something clipped to his belt, but never used it while i was with him. he kept looking up addresses, prices, and all that in a stack of papers on his clipboard instead.
if you're using OS X to read this, and have a keyboard with volume up/down keys on it, this is for you:
press one of the volume buttons on your keyboard.
note the translucent display element indicating the current system volume - a gray, lozenge-shaped "window" to use the generic term for such things. notice that you can interact with the other interface elements behind it with the mouse/keyboard. note that, after a period of inactivity (after you let go of the volume adjustment key) the interface element indicating the current volume slowly fades to transparent.
ta. da.
if you're not, however, using OS X and/or have never seen this in the wild, this patent will pretty much assure you that the same thing won't show up on a windows box near you any time soon.
allow me to be the first (of many)
on
SCO Caught Copying
·
· Score: -1, Redundant
and i didn't say i hadn't read harry potter, but that i have yet to finish it. borrowed it from a friend. not a big fan (if you can't already tell). i guess that wasn't clear. sorry.
admittedly it's something close to 20 years later, and i'm a different reader than the intended audience, but all my (insipid-best-seller-reading) friends were gushing over it, and they're reasonable adults... +5 insightful, i ain't.
well, i suppose i was trying at that point to make my post on-topic and get to the part where i said something lame about the scifi channel or something. i forget.
if i come off as pretentious, well, i guess it's because i think i'm better than you.
the earthsea books were some of my first experiences with "fantasy" fiction, long before i was able to tackle the lord of the rings series, though i recall they seemed to be written well above my normal reading at the time.
unfortunately, the "fantasy" section at my local bookwhores were filled with tripe like the endless dragonlance series and their ilk. i took a bad turn, and for a long time was dissatisfied with the genre, delving instead into more sci fi than is healthy for an adolescent.
then i took up the first of raymond feist's magician series and, though the series has been a long-time companion whenever i am in need of something to read (it has gotten steadily worse through each sequel) the premise reminded me, for some reason, of the first earthsea book. so i read leguin again, and was struck by how good it was the second time through. the sequels to earthsea never did as much for me as the first. the tombs of atuan seemed, to me, too indiana jones for my liking. it's been a long time, though, so my memory may not do the series justice.
then came harry potter. a wizard going to wizard school, making friends and enemies while learning his special abilities and discovering his hidden power. huh. that sounds familiar. i awaited word of a lawsuit, but alas...
i have yet to trudge my way through any of the potter books, or for that matter see the movies, but i recommend to any of my adult friends who do that they read a wizard of earthsea before inflicting potter on their children.
hopefully the end result of the miniseries will be similar to that of the first dune series scifi did, which was that a lot of people i know took up frank herbert for the first time. the book store i frequent these days (they have good coffee) had a whole display of dune editions, collections, etc.
and, not to give away any spoilers to those who haven't read the books, i really want to see the scene where the guy's in the thing, and there's that other thing, AND...
feh. if you were really paranoid, you'd know that the post office has developed high-speed OCR machines for routing mail that handle thousands of pieces per minute (and, some say, high-powered light systems that let them read your mail while still in the envelope). while i doubt that anything that reads your cash, no matter how quick or unobtrusive, will ever be installed at the quickee-mart, don't doubt that the banks, ATMs, vending machines or any other automated system that handles money, could already do this.
and all the ATMs are on networks to do all the necessary bank authentication already. what's to say they're not sending back serial number traces, too?
and vending machines routinely get software updates and error checks from their suppliers. dump the data from the machine, count the cash, restock the snickers bars... it's all routine. and even if the machine's not set up to do the OCR, each purchase probably gets a timestamp - if nothing else, to tell what peak hours are - and bills get stacked sequentially. correlate, correlate, correlate.
you'd be surprised how easy it is to get on a roll, once you get into the paranoid mindset.
take a look at a dollar bill - or any piece of US paper currency. notice a big fat number (surrounded by letters) anywhere on it? serial number. each note is unique. anti-counterfeiting applications, as well as tracking stolen cash, spring to mind, but then, so does something a little more sinister.
i had a chat with some friends not long ago about how the lunatic ravings of people like alex jones could possibly be true, based on simple OCR of bank notes' serial numbers. it sounds paranoid, but don't you think someone else may have thought of it?
any ATM or money changer that doles out money, or any vending machine that accepts paper money could very easily apply OCR to any bill that passes through it. each note already undergoes a battery of tests to be sure it's legal tender - and those tests are updated every time a new note goes out. how difficult would it be to sneak a software OCR into that mix, and some means of recording the serial numbers (correlated with the items purchased with that bill)
so, here's a $20 that came from this bank at this time, drawn from this person's account. it gets changed to fives, ones and subway tokens at this machine in this subway station. one of the ones is used at this station two stops down to purchase a Cola Beverage...
so, in the end, the banks will all know what your beverage of choice is. or, slightly more useful, where you spend all your yuppie green stamps (consider that the stores you shop in have to take their money to the bank, too. and it goes through money-counting machines there)
we all decided it was time to start using sacagawea dollars. but none of the vending machines around here take them...
i love all the rampant speculation and comparison between the McIntosh (sic) and the PCjr, and the 1984 ad compared to the "tramp" chaplin ads from IBM....and about 17 years later, this guy got his answer:
1. When will UNIX (XENIX, UniPlus, UNITY, or (dare I hope?) 4.2BSD)
be available for the Mac?
2. Which hapless software house gets to do the port?
actually, it was less than ten years before apple brought out a BSD-based unix for the 68k mac in the form of A/UX, but it was killed in '94 and never made it to powerpcs
this page on macobserver.com is an old article, but timely. it has links to a lot of old apple ads and brochures from the days when you had to explain to people what a mouse was.
i have a little collection of old BYTE magazines that i picked up from used book stores specifically for their apple ads. it's always amusing to me what kinds of claims they made back then...
i have a circa 1984 macintosh i picked up at a garage sale or surplus at some point. i can't remember when. i have so many now - 9 compact "toaster" models of various descriptions.
anyhoo, it's still a marvel. at some point, it has been upgraded from the original 128k to a 512k-e motherboard so it's actually pretty usable. i wish i had the original 128k mobo. i'd frame it - "look kids, soldered on memory and no expansion slot!".
the keyboard and mouse still work after 20 years, which is remarkable in itself, but by the feel of them in the hand and the action of the keys, they could have been sold a year ago.
i had to track down an operating system (and 400k floppies) to get it and its brethren to work. the folks at sun remarketing used to sell software for it - i can't find it on their site now - system version 5.x and finder 4.x, i think, but i was able to track down a couple years ago disk images all the way back to system 1.
it's tricky to get a working 400k system disk from a G3 with no floppy to a 512k with no network connection, but suffice it to say it involves another power mac and a mac plus with two floppy drives.
but anyway... the finder and few apps i have are not only remarkably fast (no multitasking, though), but beautifully designed - every pixel placed with care, and use of the very limited screen real estate well thought out.
it's no wonder, comparing this machine to some of the other '80s vintage PCs in my collection, why the press of the time was gushing over the first mac. regardless of its lack of hard drive and cooling fan (steve likes his computers quiet - and when not reading from the floppy, the mac is eerily quiet) and nonexistant expansion opportunities, it was way ahead of everything else out there.
(note: this would have been a lot easier if they hadn't made the text on their site *images*)
"lower windows staffing costs provide TCO advantage over linux"
in other words, windows network admins are a dime a dozen (not to mention flooding the marketplace, as they've all gotten layed off in the last year). and in my experience, you get what you pay for...
"wintel server 10 times less expensive to operate than linux mainframe"
in other words, "fleet of mini coopers more fuel efficient than schoolbus." let's compare apples to apples, shall we? how about linux vs NT on the same hardware? or actually *doing the same job*: "multiple WinTel Web servers perform better than a Linux mainframe acting as a Web server consolidator"
"microsoft.net development platform delivers 25% lower development costs..."
or ".net developers are also a dime a dozen"
it's this kind of thing that makes me glad i drank the Apple kool-aid years ago (there is no god but Apple, and Steve is Its prophet)
to me, that was a dead giveaway when he was first introduced in the books, though it's not long after that that the connection is revealed
a lot of the names in the books (and, for that matter, in a lot of other books) have meaning, if you look for them. either in some tolkeinish language (all the elves' names mean something, some of them significant to their character, if you know elvish) or in reference to real-world people or concepts.
at least that's what i remember reading somewhere - still googling for the link...
. o( holden caufield? "catcher in the rye"? fah! too easy... )
i guess "control-alt-delete" predates the apple][ "control - open apple - reset" key sequence. i think i may have even seen a t-shirt with that on it once...
i don't suppose the first apples had such things, but i vividly recall the apple ][ (and// for that matter) did. i can't remember if it rebooted the bugger, or just dropped it out of the running app...
i guess it evolved into the mac's command-option-escape (which is much easier to hit with one hand, while the other is giving the more appropriate "one finger salute" to the unresponsive program... and the whole slew of other two-handed startup key sequences (control-option-P-R = zap PRAM), interrupts (command-control-powerkey), and FKEYs (command-shift-3 = screenshot)
sigh. i had a point. i really did.
oh yeah. when did this whole business make its way onto platforms other than IBM PCs? i.e. when did apple adopt it? prior to the ][?
this is what you get for sending off all the telephone sanitizers in a space ship to crash on another planet, just because they're a bunch of useless bloody loonies.
though i guess it's better than being eaten by a giant mutant space goat.
(anyway, that's the first thing that came to mind when i read this.)
this is exactly why i have my backup tapes stored offsite. they're actually on a two week rotation. the current week is onsite - too frequently i have to get something off yesterday's tape because someone hosed a project file or changed their mind after emptying the trash - and the previous/next week's tapes are stored in my secure, climate-controlled offsite facility.
okay, it's my house, but it counts.
if my house burns down, it's unlikely the office will suffer the same fate, and vice versa - it's a 20 minute commute. of course, there is the possibility of a large nuclear blast that could hit both sites at once, but i doubt i'd survive, or for that matter care about recovering data, considering i'd be too busy killing off the other survivors and eating their brains..
brains... brains!
but on a more serious note, if i ever switched from tape backups (or had too much data to reasonably be able to do them on tapes) to a RAID system, how would i back *that* up and store it offsite? it's not like i can pull the whole shebang out of the rack, throw it in my car and head home each day...
here's my post in reply to a story about "strange data" (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/2 2/04322 39&tid=)
worm #1 works quietly, propagating slowly and with little fanfare, works its way around hiding its signal in the network noise of a popular operating system that's fraught with security holes. if discovered, considered harmless, no payload, no harm done. low priority.
waits. listens.
worm #2 barges around making lots of noise, none of it intelligible. targets servers running a particular server OS, routers, places where network traffic converges, is distributed. propagates to only a few choice locations, distribution points. sends out floods of gibberish to nobody in particular, not necessarily needing a reply.
considered buggy, bothersome but harmless.
worm #1 picks up on the gibber, each of the messages from different distribution points somehow encoded with their point of origin, instructions, parts of a payload. when enough of the message has been reassembled, enough of the network space mapped, worm #1 rebuilds itself. takes action.
a worm with no payload, and a payload with no worm. collaboration. cross-pollenation.
the last (several) times i have moved, I've gone down to the post office, picked up an official postal change of address form, filled it out and mailed it back in.
as far as i can tell (and the USPS may have updated their policy since the last time i moved) there's no ID, or any kind of proof of identity for that matter, involved in filling out a change of address form. that, and no confirmation after the fact that it had been accepted and processed - other than your mail showing up at the new address with a big yellow sticker over the address. i.e. nothing to prevent someone filling out a form for somebody else
in fact, i read several years ago in a book of "dirty tricks and practical jokes" that a fun little prank to pull on someone you don't like was to fill out a change of address form for them - forwarding their mail to an address in another state. another fun one was to send a threatening letter to 1600 pennsylvania ave with their return address. postal inspectors *and* secret service when the prez is in town. fun for the whole family!
now, tell me they've updated this procedure - which used to be done with a simple mail-in form - or else tell me how i'm supposed to trust this same organization as an authority regarding someone's identity.
worm #1 works quietly, propagating slowly and with little fanfare, works its way around hiding its signal in the network noise of a popular operating system that's fraught with security holes. if discovered, considered harmless, no payload, no harm done. low priority.
waits. listens.
worm #2 barges around making lots of noise, none of it intelligible. targets servers running a particular server OS, routers, places where network traffic converges, is distributed. propagates to only a few choice locations, distribution points. sends out floods of gibberish to nobody in particular, not necessarily needing a reply.
considered buggy, bothersome but harmless.
worm #1 picks up on the gibber, each of the messages from different distribution points somehow encoded with their point of origin, instructions, parts of a payload. when enough of the message has been reassembled, enough of the network space mapped, worm #1 rebuilds itself. takes action.
a worm with no payload, and a payload with no worm. collaboration. cross-pollenation.
Sure, SCO can badmouth Linux. Feh, Microsoft says worse.
Sure, they can take on Big Blue. Good luck to 'em.
They can even claim to own something that Novell says they don't. The lawyers can wrestle over the semantics.
But mess with Linus, and they're asking for trouble!
the open source flamewar fedaykin commandos are on hair-trigger alert as it is, and everyone knows they are willing to lay down their lives for their chubby Finnish madhi.
yep. quark runs in classic mode. however, quark sucks rocks in classic mode.
printing, fonts, color management - all important factors in print design, and all somehow fundamentally screwed up in classic mode. no background printing, for one... font management applications like ATM are sketchy, and while you can have all your OS 9 fonts in X, it's not the other way round.
not that OS X supports all the flexible printing options that 9 did, nor the ease of color management (i finally get used to colorsync in 9 and bam, i gotta learn it again in X), but when quark is X native, it'll be a big step towards being as productive in X as we are in 9 now.
Slashdot Mirror
i learned from the DVDs that jewel had to *gain* 20 pounds in order to play the part. she was apparently too thin when she auditioned for the part of kaylee. i think they didn't want the show's "conscience" and the emotional appendage of Serenity to draw more eyeballs than the professional companion.
but i, for one, find any woman that can go from stained two-sizes-too-big coveralls to formal evening dress without missing a beat very seksi.
in my precaffeinated state this morning, i was skimming the /. headlines, saw Joss Whedon's name and the phrase the pilot for his new show Firefly, and just about shat.
new show? firefly reborn?
then i woke up enough to read the first part of the post, "a few years back." sigh.
when the show was on, i thought it was a trek-killer, a new (to prime-time american audiences, at least), less anaesthetic vision of the spacefaring future, sure to spawn movies and probably become a *gasp* franchise, like whedon's other creations. i just thought it would be on for a few seasons first.
and yes, i'll go see the movie, even if everybody tells me it sucks. and yes, i'll buy the DVD. if only because it has jewel staite in it.
[ note to spambots trolling this article for emails: we have conveniently listed here for your perusal a number of otherwise legitimate-seeming spamtrap email addresses. what an intelligent spammer (sic) might choose to do with these is to remove all instances of the aforementioned spamtrap or "dummy" addresses from one's database, thus increasing the quality of said database. ]
i, for one, used foo@bar.com for a long time, but i began getting rejected, as that email had already been used to register, etc.
ah, so i'm not the only one who bought a house with a newton. my mp2000 was invaluable in the process of buying my house. i kept track of all the houses i saw, kept notes on them and sketches of the floorplans and property lines.
and that was just in the notebook app.
my agent was astonished, to say the least, that he couldn't get a new one for himself after i showed it to him, and the sketches i was making. "ebay," i told him, "is probably your best bet." he had, if i recall, a clie or ipaq or something clipped to his belt, but never used it while i was with him. he kept looking up addresses, prices, and all that in a stack of papers on his clipboard instead.
if you're using OS X to read this, and have a keyboard with volume up/down keys on it, this is for you:
press one of the volume buttons on your keyboard.
note the translucent display element indicating the current system volume - a gray, lozenge-shaped "window" to use the generic term for such things. notice that you can interact with the other interface elements behind it with the mouse/keyboard. note that, after a period of inactivity (after you let go of the volume adjustment key) the interface element indicating the current volume slowly fades to transparent.
ta. da.
if you're not, however, using OS X and/or have never seen this in the wild, this patent will pretty much assure you that the same thing won't show up on a windows box near you any time soon.
so, how are we supposed to pronounce that?
gooey-debook?
gee you eyed book?
that's just silly...
okaaaay.
my lawsuit riff was a (feeble) attempt at humor.
and i didn't say i hadn't read harry potter, but that i have yet to finish it. borrowed it from a friend. not a big fan (if you can't already tell). i guess that wasn't clear. sorry.
admittedly it's something close to 20 years later, and i'm a different reader than the intended audience, but all my (insipid-best-seller-reading) friends were gushing over it, and they're reasonable adults... +5 insightful, i ain't.
well, i suppose i was trying at that point to make my post on-topic and get to the part where i said something lame about the scifi channel or something. i forget.
if i come off as pretentious, well, i guess it's because i think i'm better than you.
the earthsea books were some of my first experiences with "fantasy" fiction, long before i was able to tackle the lord of the rings series, though i recall they seemed to be written well above my normal reading at the time.
unfortunately, the "fantasy" section at my local bookwhores were filled with tripe like the endless dragonlance series and their ilk. i took a bad turn, and for a long time was dissatisfied with the genre, delving instead into more sci fi than is healthy for an adolescent.
then i took up the first of raymond feist's magician series and, though the series has been a long-time companion whenever i am in need of something to read (it has gotten steadily worse through each sequel) the premise reminded me, for some reason, of the first earthsea book. so i read leguin again, and was struck by how good it was the second time through. the sequels to earthsea never did as much for me as the first. the tombs of atuan seemed, to me, too indiana jones for my liking. it's been a long time, though, so my memory may not do the series justice.
then came harry potter. a wizard going to wizard school, making friends and enemies while learning his special abilities and discovering his hidden power. huh. that sounds familiar. i awaited word of a lawsuit, but alas...
i have yet to trudge my way through any of the potter books, or for that matter see the movies, but i recommend to any of my adult friends who do that they read a wizard of earthsea before inflicting potter on their children.
hopefully the end result of the miniseries will be similar to that of the first dune series scifi did, which was that a lot of people i know took up frank herbert for the first time. the book store i frequent these days (they have good coffee) had a whole display of dune editions, collections, etc.
and, not to give away any spoilers to those who haven't read the books, i really want to see the scene where the guy's in the thing, and there's that other thing, AND...
i love that scene.
feh. if you were really paranoid, you'd know that the post office has developed high-speed OCR machines for routing mail that handle thousands of pieces per minute (and, some say, high-powered light systems that let them read your mail while still in the envelope). while i doubt that anything that reads your cash, no matter how quick or unobtrusive, will ever be installed at the quickee-mart, don't doubt that the banks, ATMs, vending machines or any other automated system that handles money, could already do this.
and all the ATMs are on networks to do all the necessary bank authentication already. what's to say they're not sending back serial number traces, too?
and vending machines routinely get software updates and error checks from their suppliers. dump the data from the machine, count the cash, restock the snickers bars... it's all routine. and even if the machine's not set up to do the OCR, each purchase probably gets a timestamp - if nothing else, to tell what peak hours are - and bills get stacked sequentially. correlate, correlate, correlate.
you'd be surprised how easy it is to get on a roll, once you get into the paranoid mindset.
strange that you think cash is "anonymous".
take a look at a dollar bill - or any piece of US paper currency. notice a big fat number (surrounded by letters) anywhere on it? serial number. each note is unique. anti-counterfeiting applications, as well as tracking stolen cash, spring to mind, but then, so does something a little more sinister.
i had a chat with some friends not long ago about how the lunatic ravings of people like alex jones could possibly be true, based on simple OCR of bank notes' serial numbers. it sounds paranoid, but don't you think someone else may have thought of it?
any ATM or money changer that doles out money, or any vending machine that accepts paper money could very easily apply OCR to any bill that passes through it. each note already undergoes a battery of tests to be sure it's legal tender - and those tests are updated every time a new note goes out. how difficult would it be to sneak a software OCR into that mix, and some means of recording the serial numbers (correlated with the items purchased with that bill)
so, here's a $20 that came from this bank at this time, drawn from this person's account. it gets changed to fives, ones and subway tokens at this machine in this subway station. one of the ones is used at this station two stops down to purchase a Cola Beverage...
so, in the end, the banks will all know what your beverage of choice is. or, slightly more useful, where you spend all your yuppie green stamps (consider that the stores you shop in have to take their money to the bank, too. and it goes through money-counting machines there)
we all decided it was time to start using sacagawea dollars. but none of the vending machines around here take them...
paranoid yet?
excellent reading. thanks for the link.
...and about 17 years later, this guy got his answer:
i love all the rampant speculation and comparison between the McIntosh (sic) and the PCjr, and the 1984 ad compared to the "tramp" chaplin ads from IBM.
1. When will UNIX (XENIX, UniPlus, UNITY, or (dare I hope?) 4.2BSD)
be available for the Mac?
2. Which hapless software house gets to do the port?
actually, it was less than ten years before apple brought out a BSD-based unix for the 68k mac in the form of A/UX, but it was killed in '94 and never made it to powerpcs
this page on macobserver.com is an old article, but timely. it has links to a lot of old apple ads and brochures from the days when you had to explain to people what a mouse was.
i have a little collection of old BYTE magazines that i picked up from used book stores specifically for their apple ads. it's always amusing to me what kinds of claims they made back then...
i have a circa 1984 macintosh i picked up at a garage sale or surplus at some point. i can't remember when. i have so many now - 9 compact "toaster" models of various descriptions.
anyhoo, it's still a marvel. at some point, it has been upgraded from the original 128k to a 512k-e motherboard so it's actually pretty usable. i wish i had the original 128k mobo. i'd frame it - "look kids, soldered on memory and no expansion slot!".
the keyboard and mouse still work after 20 years, which is remarkable in itself, but by the feel of them in the hand and the action of the keys, they could have been sold a year ago.
i had to track down an operating system (and 400k floppies) to get it and its brethren to work. the folks at sun remarketing used to sell software for it - i can't find it on their site now - system version 5.x and finder 4.x, i think, but i was able to track down a couple years ago disk images all the way back to system 1.
it's tricky to get a working 400k system disk from a G3 with no floppy to a 512k with no network connection, but suffice it to say it involves another power mac and a mac plus with two floppy drives.
but anyway... the finder and few apps i have are not only remarkably fast (no multitasking, though), but beautifully designed - every pixel placed with care, and use of the very limited screen real estate well thought out.
it's no wonder, comparing this machine to some of the other '80s vintage PCs in my collection, why the press of the time was gushing over the first mac. regardless of its lack of hard drive and cooling fan (steve likes his computers quiet - and when not reading from the floppy, the mac is eerily quiet) and nonexistant expansion opportunities, it was way ahead of everything else out there.
well, maybe with the exception of the Lisa.
(note: this would have been a lot easier if they hadn't made the text on their site *images*)
.net development platform delivers 25% lower development costs..."
"lower windows staffing costs provide TCO advantage over linux"
in other words, windows network admins are a dime a dozen (not to mention flooding the marketplace, as they've all gotten layed off in the last year). and in my experience, you get what you pay for...
"wintel server 10 times less expensive to operate than linux mainframe"
in other words, "fleet of mini coopers more fuel efficient than schoolbus." let's compare apples to apples, shall we? how about linux vs NT on the same hardware? or actually *doing the same job*: "multiple WinTel Web servers perform better than a Linux mainframe acting as a Web server consolidator"
"microsoft
or ".net developers are also a dime a dozen"
it's this kind of thing that makes me glad i drank the Apple kool-aid years ago (there is no god but Apple, and Steve is Its prophet)
sorry... where was i going with this?
more likely that he was "sauron's man"
to me, that was a dead giveaway when he was first introduced in the books, though it's not long after that that the connection is revealed
a lot of the names in the books (and, for that matter, in a lot of other books) have meaning, if you look for them. either in some tolkeinish language (all the elves' names mean something, some of them significant to their character, if you know elvish) or in reference to real-world people or concepts.
at least that's what i remember reading somewhere - still googling for the link...
. o( holden caufield? "catcher in the rye"? fah! too easy... )
i was going to look for the specs on a zire we got floating around the office, to see if i wanted it, but palm.com was unresponsive.
checking slashdot to make sure it wasn't just my connection, i see now why i couldn't get to palm.com
i guess "control-alt-delete" predates the apple][ "control - open apple - reset" key sequence. i think i may have even seen a t-shirt with that on it once...
// for that matter) did. i can't remember if it rebooted the bugger, or just dropped it out of the running app...
i don't suppose the first apples had such things, but i vividly recall the apple ][ (and
i guess it evolved into the mac's command-option-escape (which is much easier to hit with one hand, while the other is giving the more appropriate "one finger salute" to the unresponsive program... and the whole slew of other two-handed startup key sequences (control-option-P-R = zap PRAM), interrupts (command-control-powerkey), and FKEYs (command-shift-3 = screenshot)
sigh. i had a point. i really did.
oh yeah. when did this whole business make its way onto platforms other than IBM PCs? i.e. when did apple adopt it? prior to the ][?
this is what you get for sending off all the telephone sanitizers in a space ship to crash on another planet, just because they're a bunch of useless bloody loonies.
though i guess it's better than being eaten by a giant mutant space goat.
(anyway, that's the first thing that came to mind when i read this.)
this is exactly why i have my backup tapes stored offsite. they're actually on a two week rotation. the current week is onsite - too frequently i have to get something off yesterday's tape because someone hosed a project file or changed their mind after emptying the trash - and the previous/next week's tapes are stored in my secure, climate-controlled offsite facility.
okay, it's my house, but it counts.
if my house burns down, it's unlikely the office will suffer the same fate, and vice versa - it's a 20 minute commute. of course, there is the possibility of a large nuclear blast that could hit both sites at once, but i doubt i'd survive, or for that matter care about recovering data, considering i'd be too busy killing off the other survivors and eating their brains..
brains... brains!
but on a more serious note, if i ever switched from tape backups (or had too much data to reasonably be able to do them on tapes) to a RAID system, how would i back *that* up and store it offsite? it's not like i can pull the whole shebang out of the rack, throw it in my car and head home each day...
here's my post in reply to a story about "strange data"2 2/04322 39&tid=)
(http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/
worm #1 works quietly, propagating slowly and with little fanfare, works its way around hiding its signal in the network noise of a popular operating system that's fraught with security holes. if discovered, considered harmless, no payload, no harm done. low priority.
waits. listens.
worm #2 barges around making lots of noise, none of it intelligible. targets servers running a particular server OS, routers, places where network traffic converges, is distributed. propagates to only a few choice locations, distribution points. sends out floods of gibberish to nobody in particular, not necessarily needing a reply.
considered buggy, bothersome but harmless.
worm #1 picks up on the gibber, each of the messages from different distribution points somehow encoded with their point of origin, instructions, parts of a payload. when enough of the message has been reassembled, enough of the network space mapped, worm #1 rebuilds itself. takes action.
a worm with no payload, and a payload with no worm. collaboration. cross-pollenation.
fantasy?
something brought this to mind last week....
the last (several) times i have moved, I've gone down to the post office, picked up an official postal change of address form, filled it out and mailed it back in.
as far as i can tell (and the USPS may have updated their policy since the last time i moved) there's no ID, or any kind of proof of identity for that matter, involved in filling out a change of address form. that, and no confirmation after the fact that it had been accepted and processed - other than your mail showing up at the new address with a big yellow sticker over the address. i.e. nothing to prevent someone filling out a form for somebody else
in fact, i read several years ago in a book of "dirty tricks and practical jokes" that a fun little prank to pull on someone you don't like was to fill out a change of address form for them - forwarding their mail to an address in another state. another fun one was to send a threatening letter to 1600 pennsylvania ave with their return address. postal inspectors *and* secret service when the prez is in town. fun for the whole family!
now, tell me they've updated this procedure - which used to be done with a simple mail-in form - or else tell me how i'm supposed to trust this same organization as an authority regarding someone's identity.
worm #1 works quietly, propagating slowly and with little fanfare, works its way around hiding its signal in the network noise of a popular operating system that's fraught with security holes. if discovered, considered harmless, no payload, no harm done. low priority.
waits. listens.
worm #2 barges around making lots of noise, none of it intelligible. targets servers running a particular server OS, routers, places where network traffic converges, is distributed. propagates to only a few choice locations, distribution points. sends out floods of gibberish to nobody in particular, not necessarily needing a reply.
considered buggy, bothersome but harmless.
worm #1 picks up on the gibber, each of the messages from different distribution points somehow encoded with their point of origin, instructions, parts of a payload. when enough of the message has been reassembled, enough of the network space mapped, worm #1 rebuilds itself. takes action.
a worm with no payload, and a payload with no worm. collaboration. cross-pollenation.
fantasy?
Sure, SCO can badmouth Linux. Feh, Microsoft says worse.
Sure, they can take on Big Blue. Good luck to 'em.
They can even claim to own something that Novell says they don't. The lawyers can wrestle over the semantics.
But mess with Linus, and they're asking for trouble!
the open source flamewar fedaykin commandos are on hair-trigger alert as it is, and everyone knows they are willing to lay down their lives for their chubby Finnish madhi.
oh, the carnage.
yep. quark runs in classic mode.
however, quark sucks rocks in classic mode.
printing, fonts, color management - all important factors in print design, and all somehow fundamentally screwed up in classic mode. no background printing, for one... font management applications like ATM are sketchy, and while you can have all your OS 9 fonts in X, it's not the other way round.
not that OS X supports all the flexible printing options that 9 did, nor the ease of color management (i finally get used to colorsync in 9 and bam, i gotta learn it again in X), but when quark is X native, it'll be a big step towards being as productive in X as we are in 9 now.