Think of the shame in your neighbor knowing you like Tom Cruise movies. No thanks.
Maybe if they could just darken completely so you wouldn't have to see your neighors, yeah, I'd buy (plain old polarizing film, that is). Or maybe if they could give houses in California a view of something besides the side of the neighbor's house 8 feet away it would work. If they could just maybe make the house next door even 20 feet away it would sell.
-B
Smell-U Smell-Me will survive
on
F'd Companies
·
· Score: 1
SmellU SmellMe(R), the premiere Aroma Conferencing software, is coming soon from RealAroma. It'll be big. Big! I tell you...
You're positively correct: branching out is the only way to go. You can always come home, after all, and probably none the worse for the journey. I read a lot of SF, usually "hard" or military SF. I've been running out as well (I very nearly started re-reading the Stainless Steel Rat series for the third time) and have been looking to branch out. Oddly, history caught my eye.
I cannot recommend
Throwing Fire: Projectile Technology through History by Alfred Crosby enough. It's an amazing book, and actually very funny. The book's premise is an investigation into why H. sapiens became the dominant hominid on Earth. Sounds pretty bland, but it's really not. Here's a hint: chimps throw like girls and humans have deep-seated urges to light shit on fire.
Althoguh I'm not quite through with it yet, but he's covered about every military technology I can think of save nuclear arms and fuel-air bombs (with an occasional foray into oddments like the stirrup and fire as a wildlife management tool). It's the one book I've read in recent memory which has used the word 'apostasy'. It's rare treat to be educated and entertained without knowing of feeling like one or the other is (supposed to be) happening.
I also recently picked up a copy of Herotodus' The Histories and a new translation of Machiavelli's The Prince. But you know all about those so I don't have to go into them. I'm thinking about re-reading Ovid's Metamorphoses, which is just as much an SF book as anything we have nowadays.
To really stay in SF, I'd read anything by William C. Deitz (I'm a big fan of Steelheart) or John Steakley's Armor (which for some weird reason is probably my favorite SF book of all time).
I can't stand the fact that we elected a bonehead who's trainers can't be bothered to get him to say the word "nuclear". It's fingernails on the blackboard of my soul, I tell ya.
BTW, is your name by chance Jim? Burt's friend from Building I?
The way I was describing, you _do_ let Perl/PHP/whatever take care of everything. It generates the static HTML pages for you. If you make an update, it generates them again, based on the new content.
I understand you; the web site I currently work on/with is built daily via an ant "makefile" and uses a bunch of different XSLT stylesheets fed to Xalan to transform various XML docs (from all manner of sources, including two different types of databases) and produce HTML, PDF, or Postscript (depending). It's very static when served; there aren't even any server-side includes. We have a lot of space cycles on our web server.:-)
But my point was that you can't always plan on being able to generate new pages on the server-side and shouldn't rule it out as a matter of course; sometimes you need to react to user input. Not the case with this fellow's picture gallery, sure, but quite a few sites I've worked on have heavily relied on that user interaction bit. Using another personal example, we have a couple pages that rely on PHP. One page in particular calls for a rotating image (the rotating image was inordinately important, IMO, but "required" nonetheless). It would be impractical to make that happen without a little dynamics.
I think the right answer is a balance: decide what needs to be dynamic while making everything as staticly served as possible.
I mean, really, using _any_ language such as Perl, PHP, etc., to generate your content for every page view is kind of amateurish.
I disagree, slightly. If you had said that using dynamic pages when you could easily get away with static is a cop-out, I would buy that. Maybe. I know of sites which have nothing but dynamic content, due to database requirements, the nature of the stite, etc. It might be that it's more of a pain to maintain a few static pages in a sea of dynamic scripts than to let Perl/PHP/ASP/JSP take care of everything. Could be that the scripts are more easily written if they handle every "page".
Honestly, CPU is cheap and I strongly suspect that there's plenty to go around. A well-written web app which is integrated with the web server (mod_perl, PHP, et al.) won't slow a site down too much. Not everyone has CNN or Yahoo-like loads. You'd be surprised what you can do on a fairly slow Pentium even with a lot of dynamic content.
Sorry for posting this OT, but I just noticed that no karam information is displayed on my user page, and my +1 bonus seems to have dissapeared.
It's there. Look in the upper right. As far as the posting bonus, I don't know. I think they aim to being the signal out from the noise a bit, give new users a chance, that sort of thing. I'll post this w/o mine and see what I get (my other post, with the bonus, was scored a 1).
A site of mine was posted to Slashdot last spring and it survived. My site's on a shared server (dual P3 500, 512MB RAM, Apache 1.3.x, OC3), but I had all static pages. I had somewhere around 130,000 individual requests in a 24 hour period. I actually got a couple emails asking how I had configured the server to withstand the load and stay speedy so I assume it never got too unresponsive.
I believe if you don't use CGI scripts then you should be fine, load-wise, with any decent hardware. Eudora.com ran just fine for years on a Sun Ultra1 with 128MB RAM and it got a few million requests per month. Another site I ran for a previous employer also served static files (small -- less than 10K -- images, as it happens) and we ran into Apache's complied-in 256 client limit before the box (dual proc Sun E450, 2GB RAM) even got cose to keeling over. Another box (E220, 2GB RAM) which had some Perl scripts and *much* lower load got bogged down regularly.
If you have to use static content, use something like PHP or mod_perl.
Yeah, I'll go search for a copy. Ebay only has some macs versions. EBGames has MOO2 for ten bucks, although it's jewel case only. (BTW, EBgames also has MOO3 for pre-order. Ships 2/25.) Dig those system requirements, too. I haven't seen a game mention Hayes-compatible modems or IPX in a long time.
I think my favorite game of all timer -- aside from Scorched Earth -- was Starflight on the Commodore 64. I played that like I was getting paid to. I don't know why, but I couldn't put it down. I even found the ROMs for it and Starflight 2 and played them both to completion.
It sounds like the MOO series is a lot like Starflight, but I never got into any of them. Can you still buy the ealier version? Should I bother looking on ebay or whatever, or just wait for MOO3 and play that? I mean, will playing MOO2 help me to appreciate MOO3, or is 3 a stand-alone game?
The groups I worked for at both of my last two employers (a Fortune 500 company and a start-up) would automatically and routinely not even consider reading resumes that met certain criteria. Having a "degree" from DeVry, Coleman College, U of Phoenix, et al. was one such criterion. Another was having A+ or Net+ certs (especially if they were prominently placed). If either of those two criteria were met, you would hear an imitation toilet sound from the person who was reviewing it and it would be placed in a pile to keep on file (legal requirement) but not bother looking at again. Nobody meeting either of these criteria ever got phone screened, as far as I can remember. This "policy" applied to a wide variety of IT jobs.
Am I saying this was a good thing to do? No. A bad thing? Nope. Was it a policy I agreed with? Not necessarily, not that my opinion of the practice even matters. I'm simply relating my experiences regarding the relative worth of A/Net+ certs as far as tech jobs are concerned.
If I were forced to guess what the implcations are, I'd say that if you're thinking about getting A/Net+ in addition to other certs, don't bother since they won't add much value. If you have no other certs and are thinking of getting one of these in order to beef up your resume, I'd say you might be better off skipping it and spending a little more time/effort getting another type of cert (cisco, MC*, RHCE, whatever). YMMV.
Yeah, Todd's told me all about your TiVo predilection. He says that you're pretty much The Man when it comes to TiVo stuff. And I've caught myself trying to fast forward as well. It's scary.
I don't know if I mentioned this, but I also got an old series 1 TiVo (my brother bought one when they first came out). The HDD is pretty much toast, and I wanna hack it up. Put two really large drives in it, etc. I need to get hat ethernet deal those dudes sell. I'll probably be bugging you at some point...:-)
Rev. 6:12.5: "And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood, and Mig forsook all that was TiVo."
I'd seriously call support, and have them walk me through an installation. In fact, I'd weedle my way to 2nd or 3rd tier if I could before I got to the actual inserting-the-cd bit. And I'd have to turn auto-run on too. That would be a key feature of the support session: "Ok, I inserted the CD and now there's like carnival music or something coming out of my speakers! Does TurboTax come with a soundtrack?"
Feh. The only kind of music I want to hear when doing taxes is the Muzak in the lobby of my CPA. Try taking the TurboTax software packaging to tax court with you and see how much it helps.
Dental work and accounting: two things you should never do by yourself, for yourself.
I've unsubscrubed after the 'must-have-gear of year 2001' suggested $100 screwdriver (with lifetime warranty!). I wonder how much they got paid (the MaxBS magazine) to say that.
I actually own one of those Snap-On screwdrivers. I got it years ago as a repayment for a favor I did for a mechanic friend of mine. At the time I thought the repayment was not, shall we say, commensurate with the debt owed. But then I started using it and realized that he was actually giving up something terribly valuable. It is the best scrtewdriver I've ever used, hands down. I've had it for like 10-12 years now and can't deal with other drivers. The grip, in particular, is what does it -- it works so well that it's very easy to strip threads and actually break screws if you use cheap hardware. But if you have to drive a deck screw into a 2x4 by hand, there's no other tool. It's wholly unsuited for PC uses, however.
The only problem I had with MaxPC recommending it was the fact that the tip is *incredibly* magnetic. Like, lots and lots for a plain old screwdriver. You can shove the driver into a bucket of screws and the thing will come out absolutely festooned with screws. It will do the Jedi force screw pickup trick from about an inch away, which is annoying until you get used to it (and then it becomes handy). It's probably got a real rare earth magnet in the tip to make it so strong (and expensive). And it's the last tool I would use to screw a motherboard into a case with. Even it the tip wasn't very magnetic, it's just not a good driver for really delicate work.
As far as MaxPC getting paid to shill them, I don't think so. Snap-On has their target audience pretty well sewn up and probably doesn't need the handful of PC owners willing to pay $100 for a tool to increase/maintain their sales. They have trucks that drive around to mechanics and they have drivers/sale people that know their routes and they protect their customer loyalty fiercely. Because they haven't really set up their distribution model as a "normal" retail channel, courting a couple hardcore PC geeks is definitely not their market and doing so through a computer magazine would not be a wise decision for them to make.
Besides, I've seen MaxPC absolutely trash a product whose ad is on the facing page. They're notoriously cruel, in fact, and I think they tend to err on the side of being a little too mean (eg, they'll ding a perfectly decent video card because it doesn't have like a TV out port -- forgetting that this features might not be something everyone wants or uses and brings the price of the card down). I've never seen them with an obviously bum recommendation and I'd trust their review over those of any Ziff-Davis publication in a flat second. I was a little amazed at their recommendation at first, but it was not because of their jounalistic integrity.
Slashdot Mirror
Cool. I can relive the /. effect as a chronic hysteresis. Super. Just great. What are we supposed to do now?
Would you happen to have a key?
-B
Maybe if they could just darken completely so you wouldn't have to see your neighors, yeah, I'd buy (plain old polarizing film, that is). Or maybe if they could give houses in California a view of something besides the side of the neighbor's house 8 feet away it would work. If they could just maybe make the house next door even 20 feet away it would sell.
-B
-B
I cannot recommend Throwing Fire: Projectile Technology through History by Alfred Crosby enough. It's an amazing book, and actually very funny. The book's premise is an investigation into why H. sapiens became the dominant hominid on Earth. Sounds pretty bland, but it's really not. Here's a hint: chimps throw like girls and humans have deep-seated urges to light shit on fire.
Althoguh I'm not quite through with it yet, but he's covered about every military technology I can think of save nuclear arms and fuel-air bombs (with an occasional foray into oddments like the stirrup and fire as a wildlife management tool). It's the one book I've read in recent memory which has used the word 'apostasy'. It's rare treat to be educated and entertained without knowing of feeling like one or the other is (supposed to be) happening.
I also recently picked up a copy of Herotodus' The Histories and a new translation of Machiavelli's The Prince. But you know all about those so I don't have to go into them. I'm thinking about re-reading Ovid's Metamorphoses, which is just as much an SF book as anything we have nowadays.
To really stay in SF, I'd read anything by William C. Deitz (I'm a big fan of Steelheart) or John Steakley's Armor (which for some weird reason is probably my favorite SF book of all time).
-B
BTW, is your name by chance Jim? Burt's friend from Building I?
-B
Plastic
Conflagration
-B
I understand you; the web site I currently work on/with is built daily via an ant "makefile" and uses a bunch of different XSLT stylesheets fed to Xalan to transform various XML docs (from all manner of sources, including two different types of databases) and produce HTML, PDF, or Postscript (depending). It's very static when served; there aren't even any server-side includes. We have a lot of space cycles on our web server. :-)
But my point was that you can't always plan on being able to generate new pages on the server-side and shouldn't rule it out as a matter of course; sometimes you need to react to user input. Not the case with this fellow's picture gallery, sure, but quite a few sites I've worked on have heavily relied on that user interaction bit. Using another personal example, we have a couple pages that rely on PHP. One page in particular calls for a rotating image (the rotating image was inordinately important, IMO, but "required" nonetheless). It would be impractical to make that happen without a little dynamics.
I think the right answer is a balance: decide what needs to be dynamic while making everything as staticly served as possible.
-B
-B
I disagree, slightly. If you had said that using dynamic pages when you could easily get away with static is a cop-out, I would buy that. Maybe. I know of sites which have nothing but dynamic content, due to database requirements, the nature of the stite, etc. It might be that it's more of a pain to maintain a few static pages in a sea of dynamic scripts than to let Perl/PHP/ASP/JSP take care of everything. Could be that the scripts are more easily written if they handle every "page".
Honestly, CPU is cheap and I strongly suspect that there's plenty to go around. A well-written web app which is integrated with the web server (mod_perl, PHP, et al.) won't slow a site down too much. Not everyone has CNN or Yahoo-like loads. You'd be surprised what you can do on a fairly slow Pentium even with a lot of dynamic content.
-B
That got a 1 as well. Looks like a bug or something.
-B
It's there. Look in the upper right. As far as the posting bonus, I don't know. I think they aim to being the signal out from the noise a bit, give new users a chance, that sort of thing. I'll post this w/o mine and see what I get (my other post, with the bonus, was scored a 1).
-B
Well, there is a fairly decent precedent already set. I'd say your chances are pretty good. :-)
-B
-B
I believe if you don't use CGI scripts then you should be fine, load-wise, with any decent hardware. Eudora.com ran just fine for years on a Sun Ultra1 with 128MB RAM and it got a few million requests per month. Another site I ran for a previous employer also served static files (small -- less than 10K -- images, as it happens) and we ran into Apache's complied-in 256 client limit before the box (dual proc Sun E450, 2GB RAM) even got cose to keeling over. Another box (E220, 2GB RAM) which had some Perl scripts and *much* lower load got bogged down regularly.
If you have to use static content, use something like PHP or mod_perl.
-B
Gamestop has MOO2 for ten dollars as well. Doesn't say whether it's jewel case or not.
I went and grabbed MOO1. Only got 5.1KB/sec. Still only took a couple minutes... :-)
-B
-B
-B
It sounds like the MOO series is a lot like Starflight, but I never got into any of them. Can you still buy the ealier version? Should I bother looking on ebay or whatever, or just wait for MOO3 and play that? I mean, will playing MOO2 help me to appreciate MOO3, or is 3 a stand-alone game?
-B
-B
Am I saying this was a good thing to do? No. A bad thing? Nope. Was it a policy I agreed with? Not necessarily, not that my opinion of the practice even matters. I'm simply relating my experiences regarding the relative worth of A/Net+ certs as far as tech jobs are concerned.
If I were forced to guess what the implcations are, I'd say that if you're thinking about getting A/Net+ in addition to other certs, don't bother since they won't add much value. If you have no other certs and are thinking of getting one of these in order to beef up your resume, I'd say you might be better off skipping it and spending a little more time/effort getting another type of cert (cisco, MC*, RHCE, whatever). YMMV.
-B
I don't know if I mentioned this, but I also got an old series 1 TiVo (my brother bought one when they first came out). The HDD is pretty much toast, and I wanna hack it up. Put two really large drives in it, etc. I need to get hat ethernet deal those dudes sell. I'll probably be bugging you at some point... :-)
-B
-B
-B
Feh. The only kind of music I want to hear when doing taxes is the Muzak in the lobby of my CPA. Try taking the TurboTax software packaging to tax court with you and see how much it helps.
Dental work and accounting: two things you should never do by yourself, for yourself.
-B
I actually own one of those Snap-On screwdrivers. I got it years ago as a repayment for a favor I did for a mechanic friend of mine. At the time I thought the repayment was not, shall we say, commensurate with the debt owed. But then I started using it and realized that he was actually giving up something terribly valuable. It is the best scrtewdriver I've ever used, hands down. I've had it for like 10-12 years now and can't deal with other drivers. The grip, in particular, is what does it -- it works so well that it's very easy to strip threads and actually break screws if you use cheap hardware. But if you have to drive a deck screw into a 2x4 by hand, there's no other tool. It's wholly unsuited for PC uses, however.
The only problem I had with MaxPC recommending it was the fact that the tip is *incredibly* magnetic. Like, lots and lots for a plain old screwdriver. You can shove the driver into a bucket of screws and the thing will come out absolutely festooned with screws. It will do the Jedi force screw pickup trick from about an inch away, which is annoying until you get used to it (and then it becomes handy). It's probably got a real rare earth magnet in the tip to make it so strong (and expensive). And it's the last tool I would use to screw a motherboard into a case with. Even it the tip wasn't very magnetic, it's just not a good driver for really delicate work.
As far as MaxPC getting paid to shill them, I don't think so. Snap-On has their target audience pretty well sewn up and probably doesn't need the handful of PC owners willing to pay $100 for a tool to increase/maintain their sales. They have trucks that drive around to mechanics and they have drivers/sale people that know their routes and they protect their customer loyalty fiercely. Because they haven't really set up their distribution model as a "normal" retail channel, courting a couple hardcore PC geeks is definitely not their market and doing so through a computer magazine would not be a wise decision for them to make.
Besides, I've seen MaxPC absolutely trash a product whose ad is on the facing page. They're notoriously cruel, in fact, and I think they tend to err on the side of being a little too mean (eg, they'll ding a perfectly decent video card because it doesn't have like a TV out port -- forgetting that this features might not be something everyone wants or uses and brings the price of the card down). I've never seen them with an obviously bum recommendation and I'd trust their review over those of any Ziff-Davis publication in a flat second. I was a little amazed at their recommendation at first, but it was not because of their jounalistic integrity.
-B