They usually allow you to attach keywords, date taken &c (if the graphic file format supports it they will probably extract that data from the file itself and allow you to manually edit it and enter more with changes written back into the file); meta data like that. Quite a number of them will also allow you to generate photo albums that you can publish directly to the web or CD, professional ones will include functions to track where a photo has been published and the terms of the license they were published under.
A lot more than a filemanager type app like Konqueror.
The way I see it the key factor for getting Linux onto the desktop as a consumer OS is that I should be able to walk into a high street electronics shop, buy a digital camera (or printer, scanner, video digitiser, graphics tablet &c) and have it just work when I plug it in to my PC. At most I should have to put a CD in the CD drive which will automatically start up the driver installation program which will require no more than clicking next a few times and deciding whether I want an icon put on my 'Start Menu', Desktop or both.
People are used to the Windows way of doing things. Whilst the Linux drivers for a lot of devices are becoming more common that level of ease of use is not currently available with any distro I've come accross.
Fortunately there is a project (Project Utopia) aimed at providing that. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a huge amount of publicity about it outside the blogs of the authors and a few forum posts and geeky website articles. Last night I atteneded a Linux user group meeting in Birmingham (Eric Raymond was due to speak but got called away at the last minute so someoneelse delivered the talk), of the 70 odd people in the room only two or three had even heard of this project. Hopelyfully this will change as one of the developers will be speaking at OSCON about it this year.
By the way, did I hallucinate it or is Slashdot now running banner ads for a human cloning service claiming testimonials from the parents of resurrected children?!?
Face it, they're at least as believable as the Microsoft ones. Microsoft: they have been weighed, they have been measured and they have been found most wanting.
Stephen
PS This isn't random Microsoft bashing. I have to evaluated their products. Some are good (a few would be excellent if the security holes were fixed), most are very, very poor IMHO.
Available: Caffeine tablets available in Chemist shops
Certainty: don't know
Notes: I don't know very much about this. There isn't all that much caffeine in coffee, maybe 200 mg.
The upshot of that, I guess, is that coffee isn't likely to kill you.
Stephen
Re:Warning: Coffee contains DHMO
on
Death by Coffee?
·
· Score: 1
Or maybe they read the articles recently about a public health official who read this website and immediately issued a health warning. Try Googling for more examples.
At least they bothered to put a subject in. What really pisses me off is those fucking morons (i.e. most of my coworkers) who can't even be bothered to put any subject line in. Excluding spam, I get 200+ emails a day in my work inbox. Of which about 10-15 needs immediate attention, 40-50 need some action and the rest are just FYI type. No subject line means I have to go into every mail and read the damn thing so waste loads of time reading FYI mails.
The difference between Google and regular ads on other sites is quite simple and utterly genius. Typical websites will show the same ads to everyone regardless of their interests. Google uses the search string you entered (possibly previous search strings as well through use of cookies) to glean information of what you're likely to be interested in. It then shows you adverts based on those interests. Targetted advertising is worth a lot more for many reasons: You're more likely to click through on an ad you're interested in than one you're not (they get paid more for click throughs that just page impressions); They don't clutter up the screen with loads of ads you're not interestred in so putting you off using their site; They can support a far larger number of advertisers; They can sell the adverts on the basis of preselected viewers.
Get a stack of small sheets of paper (helps if they're slightly absorbant, blotting paper is ideal) and place a small drop of water on one, ensure that is it soaked up by the paper. Put the piece witht he wet spot somewhere near the middle of the stack and leave for a while (let the water soak into the adjacent sheets). With the paper still in the stack put it in a microwave oven and heat on full power for 30 seconds. Depending on the amount of water you put on the initial sheet you might see the paper catch fire in the oven and explode or when you get the stack out you might see a scorch mark on the sheet you put the water on and the sheets either side of it. Very much like the photographs of the $20 bills in the article.
Metal reflects microwaves, water is heated by microwaves. Seeing a burned spot demonstrates the presence of water, not an RFID chip. Microwaves destroy RFID chips much like static electricity destroys CMOS chips, the electric field generated (several thousand volts but tiny amounts of current over very short amouints of time) destroys the P-N junctions. The heating effect is negligable.
I've seen similar effects wiping magnetic tapes in a domestic microwave.
I can only assume that the affected spot on the writer's $20 bills had gotten damp (maybe there's something about the way the bills are made that makes that spot more absorbant).
I was running the Websphere Admin Console under Cygwin yesterday. Maybe you need to look at your settings? Were you using:0 or:0.0 in your DISPLAY variable. I've noticed that sometimes:0 won't work and you have to use:0.0 but as:0.0 is what I always use anyway (and it's the default) it's not really an issue. The only time I've had problems it turned out to be a firewall between me and the server which was blocking the ports (and the remote box wasn't set up to tunnel X over SSH).
If you're not averse to free software then I suggest you try Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/). It's a lot easier to set up than Hummbingbird eXeed. It's also free. I've been using it for a few years now to get X access to remote *nix boxen, never had any problems cos it's easy to setup and use. And did I mention that, unliek Hummingbird eXeed, it's free?
I figured the post I was replying to was talking more generally than just New Mexico. About all I can really remember about New Mexico off the top of my head is that it's the state where Roswell is and a lot of people think it's not part of the US (I've read). I don't know anyone who lives there and I've never had any dealings with anyone in the state so it's never really featured in my life (aside from the afore mentioned Roswell). I'm sure many people in New Mexico are similarly ignorant of the region of England I live in (West Midlands).
I'd like to bring back public flogging. Drag 'em into a public square, tie them to a post and whip the hell out of them till they pass out then wake them up and whip them some more. It could replace watching 'The Game' as Saturday afternoon entertainment. Get some fast food and soft drink stands set up and charge them rent, it would be self financing, probably even turn a profit.
Car dealers tend to be significant donors in local politics. The dealers are a group like the taxi-owners, they depend on political favors for their business.
Couldn't they just set the car dealers and taxi owners against each other? Tougher drink driving laws and more energetic enforcement of those laws should result in increase in business for the taxis (more drivers deciding not to risk it when they've had a few or having to get a taxi beacuse their car won't start cos they're tanked then those who decided to risk it and lost their license).
Assuming the situation in the US is similar to the one on the UK then the answers to the question are "Lobbying" and "Attitude". Basically there are very strong lobby groups who pressure lawmakers to work infavour of the pro-motor groups. One of the lesser known functions of AA (Automobile Association not Alcoholics Anonymous) and RAC (Royal Automobile Club, I think) is to push a pro-car point of view in parlement. Until quite recently drunk driving in this country has always been viewed with a degree of humour. People have been quite boastful of 'getting away' with driving well over the limit. Fortunately (with greater publicity of deaths through drunk driving) more people are realizing that it's not funny, it's lethal.
Personally I think that getting caught drunk driving should result in a ban for a significant period of time. Say 36 months for a first offense then double for each subsequent offense for life (so 4th offense results in a 24 year ban) and require that drivers retake their driving test to get their license back (for any driving offense that results in a loss of license, not just drunk driving). Some people argue that people shouldn't be banned because they need to drive for their job so they would lose their job if they lose their license. Well, I think that if you know your job is dependant on having a driving license you should be extra careful to not do anything that would cause you to lose it. There are lots of people in jobs where they have to keep up their qualifications to continue in that job, needing a driving license for your job is just like that.
We all have to take stop gap jobs once in a while. I studied Biochemistry and electronic engineering at University anmd graduated in the middle of the worst recession the UK has had since the 1920s. My first two jobs were as a care assistant for people with Severe Learning Difficulties and Challenging Behaviours. Then I was unemployed for the most of a year and got a job as a low paid (about 11k ukp pa) desktop/network/server support technician for a small software company. Within 2 and a half years I'd doubled my salary and was an Oracle DBA and UNIX sysadmin. Now, 4 and a half years further down the line, I'm on about three times what I was in that first technical job (and about 5 times what I was making as a care assistant) as a technical project manager type of role working in the public sector (so really good job security).
I think that what you have to do is always be reading up on new technology and stuff that's going on in the workplace but is outside of your current job role. That way even if you're not doing stuff as part of your job you can at least mention it on your resume as something you're studying in your spare time and if one day (to take what happened to me as an example) the DBA is off sick and they need some work done urgently you can say "I could do that!"
By spending some of my spare time reading up on new developments and the business side of things I've made sure that when a new opportunity comes up I'm best placed to benefit from it. Also I'm now confident that I can walk into a meeting or supplier presentation and, even if it's not my core area, I'll be able to follow what's going on and ask intelligent questions.
On that note, be very wary going into interviews you got through a recruitment consultancy. There's been a number of times I've gone into an interview only to find that the recruitment consultant has over sold me (one time they'd sent the employer my resume but added the word 'Senior' infront of all my job titles and checnged some of the wording so that "some eperience of" became "extensive experience of"). Sure I got the interviews, but often they were for jobs I had no real hope of getting.
I'm not anti recruitment consultants, actually I'm very much in favor (both as a hiree and hirer). My last 3 jobs were ones I got through consultants (2 of them were never advertised and so were only available through agencies, this is quite common in the UK for technical jobs). You just have to be careful of the ones trying to pad their commission by overselling employees to the managers and jobs to the prospective employees. The other downside is that the consultants often will ignore your preferences when selecting you for a job and will put you forward for anything you have the skills for. When I send my resume to agencies I always specify that I'm only interested in jobs that are primaraly Oracle DBA roles and that I'm not interested in any jobs in London (I hate working in London). Some agencies insist on continously phoning me with "a great opportunity. It's a Windows system administrator in central London." When that happens I give them two chances and ont he third ask to be taken off their books then write to the head of the agency to complain about the consultant.
It made the morning TV news here in the UK. When I heard it my first thought was how cool it would be if open source hackers got a hold of the code and started submitting fixes a la an open source project.
I'd also trying to linking technical problems to business problems and the technical solution to a business solution. For example don't say "The network is too slow, we need to go to Gigabit!", instead say "The network is a bit on the slow side, we figure it's got to add at least a minute to the average time it takes to process an order in the sales centre. If we went to Gigabit and put some more memory in the database server then the sales centre could handle more orders in the same time." Senior managers like that cos it puts the technical problem in a context that they can understand. It also means that at the next board meeting they can say "We could shave a minute off the average time it takes to place an order if we move the network to Gigabit and increase the memory in the database server." which sounds cool and probably makes their penis grow half an inch (very few senior managers are women, those that are tend to be too intelligent to be taken in by such a transparent ruse so I recommend leaving them alone).
Actually the Quaran doesn't call the Jews donkeys anyway. I've searched the Quran for the word Donkey and it only appears twice. The nearest it gets is in 'Al Jumua' where it likens those who claim to follow Mosaic law but fail to do so to donkeys who carry books but fail to understand them. It's not the being Jewish that's the problem, it's claiming to be Jewish but not following the Jewish scriptures. The other is in 'Al-Baquara' where Allah is exhorting the masses to look at the prosperity they enjoy under his patronage.
First off the comment about unconstitutionality was more the idea of the federal government telling the states what to do. Secondly there are people on/. who will claim that anything that the federal government do is unconstitutional and an invasion of their privacy. The government could fund a national voluntary "Know your constitutional rights" training scheme where any citizen anywhere could drop in anonymously to study the constitution and discuss it with others, and these people would claim it was unconstitutional and a violation of their privacy and right to privacy. Some of these people are obviously wearing tin foil hats but others appear otherwise quite normal. It was this group I was alluding to. Given that you've got a 4 digit user number I'd have thought you'd have run across that sort often enough.
Unfortunately/. would then erupt in a cacophany of how the federal government was invading the privacy of every Citizen, violating the constitution (actually that might technically be a violation of the constitution), raping everyone's daughters and spying on everyone whilst giving tax money to the [RI|MP]AA. Personally I think it's a good idea, in theory we're trying to do something similar with XML schemas used by local and central in the UK. The problem there is that it has no teeth so people are going off and doing their own thing to create schemas that are as incompatible and obscure as possible whilst still sticking within the letter of the XML standard.
Slashdot Mirror
They usually allow you to attach keywords, date taken &c (if the graphic file format supports it they will probably extract that data from the file itself and allow you to manually edit it and enter more with changes written back into the file); meta data like that. Quite a number of them will also allow you to generate photo albums that you can publish directly to the web or CD, professional ones will include functions to track where a photo has been published and the terms of the license they were published under.
A lot more than a filemanager type app like Konqueror.
Stephen
The way I see it the key factor for getting Linux onto the desktop as a consumer OS is that I should be able to walk into a high street electronics shop, buy a digital camera (or printer, scanner, video digitiser, graphics tablet &c) and have it just work when I plug it in to my PC. At most I should have to put a CD in the CD drive which will automatically start up the driver installation program which will require no more than clicking next a few times and deciding whether I want an icon put on my 'Start Menu', Desktop or both.
People are used to the Windows way of doing things. Whilst the Linux drivers for a lot of devices are becoming more common that level of ease of use is not currently available with any distro I've come accross.
Fortunately there is a project (Project Utopia) aimed at providing that. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a huge amount of publicity about it outside the blogs of the authors and a few forum posts and geeky website articles. Last night I atteneded a Linux user group meeting in Birmingham (Eric Raymond was due to speak but got called away at the last minute so someoneelse delivered the talk), of the 70 odd people in the room only two or three had even heard of this project. Hopelyfully this will change as one of the developers will be speaking at OSCON about it this year.
Stephen
Sadly not. I've seen pages that render fine in IE5 but are screwed up in IE6 and visa versa.
Stephen
Face it, they're at least as believable as the Microsoft ones. Microsoft: they have been weighed, they have been measured and they have been found most wanting.
Stephen
PS This isn't random Microsoft bashing. I have to evaluated their products. Some are good (a few would be excellent if the security holes were fixed), most are very, very poor IMHO.
Actually it's frozen door to door sales men. At weekends the younger demons go skating on them.
Stephen
PS If any one is confused, it's a reference to "Good Omens" by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.
From alt.suicide.holiday methods FAQ:
The upshot of that, I guess, is that coffee isn't likely to kill you.
Stephen
Or maybe they read the articles recently about a public health official who read this website and immediately issued a health warning. Try Googling for more examples.
Stephen
At least they bothered to put a subject in. What really pisses me off is those fucking morons (i.e. most of my coworkers) who can't even be bothered to put any subject line in. Excluding spam, I get 200+ emails a day in my work inbox. Of which about 10-15 needs immediate attention, 40-50 need some action and the rest are just FYI type. No subject line means I have to go into every mail and read the damn thing so waste loads of time reading FYI mails.
Stephen
The difference between Google and regular ads on other sites is quite simple and utterly genius. Typical websites will show the same ads to everyone regardless of their interests. Google uses the search string you entered (possibly previous search strings as well through use of cookies) to glean information of what you're likely to be interested in. It then shows you adverts based on those interests. Targetted advertising is worth a lot more for many reasons: You're more likely to click through on an ad you're interested in than one you're not (they get paid more for click throughs that just page impressions); They don't clutter up the screen with loads of ads you're not interestred in so putting you off using their site; They can support a far larger number of advertisers; They can sell the adverts on the basis of preselected viewers.
Stephen
Get a stack of small sheets of paper (helps if they're slightly absorbant, blotting paper is ideal) and place a small drop of water on one, ensure that is it soaked up by the paper. Put the piece witht he wet spot somewhere near the middle of the stack and leave for a while (let the water soak into the adjacent sheets). With the paper still in the stack put it in a microwave oven and heat on full power for 30 seconds. Depending on the amount of water you put on the initial sheet you might see the paper catch fire in the oven and explode or when you get the stack out you might see a scorch mark on the sheet you put the water on and the sheets either side of it. Very much like the photographs of the $20 bills in the article.
Metal reflects microwaves, water is heated by microwaves. Seeing a burned spot demonstrates the presence of water, not an RFID chip. Microwaves destroy RFID chips much like static electricity destroys CMOS chips, the electric field generated (several thousand volts but tiny amounts of current over very short amouints of time) destroys the P-N junctions. The heating effect is negligable.
I've seen similar effects wiping magnetic tapes in a domestic microwave.
I can only assume that the affected spot on the writer's $20 bills had gotten damp (maybe there's something about the way the bills are made that makes that spot more absorbant).
Stephen
The only major problem I have with that quote is that some people seem to have really wacked definitions of 'essential' and 'temporary'.
Stephen
I was running the Websphere Admin Console under Cygwin yesterday. Maybe you need to look at your settings? Were you using :0 or :0.0 in your DISPLAY variable. I've noticed that sometimes :0 won't work and you have to use :0.0 but as :0.0 is what I always use anyway (and it's the default) it's not really an issue. The only time I've had problems it turned out to be a firewall between me and the server which was blocking the ports (and the remote box wasn't set up to tunnel X over SSH).
Stephen
If you're not averse to free software then I suggest you try Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/). It's a lot easier to set up than Hummbingbird eXeed. It's also free. I've been using it for a few years now to get X access to remote *nix boxen, never had any problems cos it's easy to setup and use. And did I mention that, unliek Hummingbird eXeed, it's free?
Stephen
I figured the post I was replying to was talking more generally than just New Mexico. About all I can really remember about New Mexico off the top of my head is that it's the state where Roswell is and a lot of people think it's not part of the US (I've read). I don't know anyone who lives there and I've never had any dealings with anyone in the state so it's never really featured in my life (aside from the afore mentioned Roswell). I'm sure many people in New Mexico are similarly ignorant of the region of England I live in (West Midlands).
Stephen
I'd like to bring back public flogging. Drag 'em into a public square, tie them to a post and whip the hell out of them till they pass out then wake them up and whip them some more. It could replace watching 'The Game' as Saturday afternoon entertainment. Get some fast food and soft drink stands set up and charge them rent, it would be self financing, probably even turn a profit.
Stephen
Couldn't they just set the car dealers and taxi owners against each other? Tougher drink driving laws and more energetic enforcement of those laws should result in increase in business for the taxis (more drivers deciding not to risk it when they've had a few or having to get a taxi beacuse their car won't start cos they're tanked then those who decided to risk it and lost their license).
Stephen
At least if he's president someone else will be driving most of the time.
Stephen
Assuming the situation in the US is similar to the one on the UK then the answers to the question are "Lobbying" and "Attitude". Basically there are very strong lobby groups who pressure lawmakers to work infavour of the pro-motor groups. One of the lesser known functions of AA (Automobile Association not Alcoholics Anonymous) and RAC (Royal Automobile Club, I think) is to push a pro-car point of view in parlement. Until quite recently drunk driving in this country has always been viewed with a degree of humour. People have been quite boastful of 'getting away' with driving well over the limit. Fortunately (with greater publicity of deaths through drunk driving) more people are realizing that it's not funny, it's lethal.
Personally I think that getting caught drunk driving should result in a ban for a significant period of time. Say 36 months for a first offense then double for each subsequent offense for life (so 4th offense results in a 24 year ban) and require that drivers retake their driving test to get their license back (for any driving offense that results in a loss of license, not just drunk driving). Some people argue that people shouldn't be banned because they need to drive for their job so they would lose their job if they lose their license. Well, I think that if you know your job is dependant on having a driving license you should be extra careful to not do anything that would cause you to lose it. There are lots of people in jobs where they have to keep up their qualifications to continue in that job, needing a driving license for your job is just like that.
Stephen
We all have to take stop gap jobs once in a while. I studied Biochemistry and electronic engineering at University anmd graduated in the middle of the worst recession the UK has had since the 1920s. My first two jobs were as a care assistant for people with Severe Learning Difficulties and Challenging Behaviours. Then I was unemployed for the most of a year and got a job as a low paid (about 11k ukp pa) desktop/network/server support technician for a small software company. Within 2 and a half years I'd doubled my salary and was an Oracle DBA and UNIX sysadmin. Now, 4 and a half years further down the line, I'm on about three times what I was in that first technical job (and about 5 times what I was making as a care assistant) as a technical project manager type of role working in the public sector (so really good job security).
I think that what you have to do is always be reading up on new technology and stuff that's going on in the workplace but is outside of your current job role. That way even if you're not doing stuff as part of your job you can at least mention it on your resume as something you're studying in your spare time and if one day (to take what happened to me as an example) the DBA is off sick and they need some work done urgently you can say "I could do that!"
By spending some of my spare time reading up on new developments and the business side of things I've made sure that when a new opportunity comes up I'm best placed to benefit from it. Also I'm now confident that I can walk into a meeting or supplier presentation and, even if it's not my core area, I'll be able to follow what's going on and ask intelligent questions.
Stephen
On that note, be very wary going into interviews you got through a recruitment consultancy. There's been a number of times I've gone into an interview only to find that the recruitment consultant has over sold me (one time they'd sent the employer my resume but added the word 'Senior' infront of all my job titles and checnged some of the wording so that "some eperience of" became "extensive experience of"). Sure I got the interviews, but often they were for jobs I had no real hope of getting.
I'm not anti recruitment consultants, actually I'm very much in favor (both as a hiree and hirer). My last 3 jobs were ones I got through consultants (2 of them were never advertised and so were only available through agencies, this is quite common in the UK for technical jobs). You just have to be careful of the ones trying to pad their commission by overselling employees to the managers and jobs to the prospective employees. The other downside is that the consultants often will ignore your preferences when selecting you for a job and will put you forward for anything you have the skills for. When I send my resume to agencies I always specify that I'm only interested in jobs that are primaraly Oracle DBA roles and that I'm not interested in any jobs in London (I hate working in London). Some agencies insist on continously phoning me with "a great opportunity. It's a Windows system administrator in central London." When that happens I give them two chances and ont he third ask to be taken off their books then write to the head of the agency to complain about the consultant.
Stephen
It made the morning TV news here in the UK. When I heard it my first thought was how cool it would be if open source hackers got a hold of the code and started submitting fixes a la an open source project.
Stephen
I'd also trying to linking technical problems to business problems and the technical solution to a business solution. For example don't say "The network is too slow, we need to go to Gigabit!", instead say "The network is a bit on the slow side, we figure it's got to add at least a minute to the average time it takes to process an order in the sales centre. If we went to Gigabit and put some more memory in the database server then the sales centre could handle more orders in the same time." Senior managers like that cos it puts the technical problem in a context that they can understand. It also means that at the next board meeting they can say "We could shave a minute off the average time it takes to place an order if we move the network to Gigabit and increase the memory in the database server." which sounds cool and probably makes their penis grow half an inch (very few senior managers are women, those that are tend to be too intelligent to be taken in by such a transparent ruse so I recommend leaving them alone).
Stephen
Actually the Quaran doesn't call the Jews donkeys anyway. I've searched the Quran for the word Donkey and it only appears twice. The nearest it gets is in 'Al Jumua' where it likens those who claim to follow Mosaic law but fail to do so to donkeys who carry books but fail to understand them. It's not the being Jewish that's the problem, it's claiming to be Jewish but not following the Jewish scriptures. The other is in 'Al-Baquara' where Allah is exhorting the masses to look at the prosperity they enjoy under his patronage.
Stephen
First off the comment about unconstitutionality was more the idea of the federal government telling the states what to do. Secondly there are people on /. who will claim that anything that the federal government do is unconstitutional and an invasion of their privacy. The government could fund a national voluntary "Know your constitutional rights" training scheme where any citizen anywhere could drop in anonymously to study the constitution and discuss it with others, and these people would claim it was unconstitutional and a violation of their privacy and right to privacy. Some of these people are obviously wearing tin foil hats but others appear otherwise quite normal. It was this group I was alluding to. Given that you've got a 4 digit user number I'd have thought you'd have run across that sort often enough.
Stephen
Unfortunately /. would then erupt in a cacophany of how the federal government was invading the privacy of every Citizen, violating the constitution (actually that might technically be a violation of the constitution), raping everyone's daughters and spying on everyone whilst giving tax money to the [RI|MP]AA. Personally I think it's a good idea, in theory we're trying to do something similar with XML schemas used by local and central in the UK. The problem there is that it has no teeth so people are going off and doing their own thing to create schemas that are as incompatible and obscure as possible whilst still sticking within the letter of the XML standard.
Stephen