The previous comment was referring to Shaw user email account, i.e. homersimpson@shaw.ca. You can't access their POP3 server if you're connecting from another ISP. But that's what Gmail is for;)
Nah. That's what fetchmail and dyndns.org are for. I grab all my Shaw email and store it on my home machine inside the Shaw network. Thanks to ssh I can read and send email from pretty much anywhere in the world except the People's Republic of China.
According to Microsoft, "innovation" and "R&D" are all about training CS students to use Microsoft software instead of all of those old-fashioned languages and operating systems.
I have one PC with a hyper-threading P4 and the recent Knoppix and Ubuntu live CD's I've tried lately all fail to boot. The LILO screen works and the kernel loads, but almost immediately I get a flood of error messages about IRQ 18 and then the kernels all hang or slowly repeat the errors over and over again.
Tats, while the traditional mark of someone about to kick your butt, are not allowed on skin that is visible while wearing a long-sleeved dress uniform.
I read a story last week (sorry, no URL) that said the U.S. military was considering dropping the tattoo ban, at least temporarily, in order to widen the pool of available applicants for voluntary service during the "war on terror". It seems they're a few tens of thousands of soldiers short....
The Chicago Sun-Times also ran a story today on the issue of tattoos and piercings in the workplace. They say that it's becoming more acceptable.
It could simply be that Castro wants to improve national security by ensuring there are no back doors through which the American 3-letter agencies can spy on the Cuban government....
they asked with the publishing of that article for MOG to be pulled and the offices of SYS-CON pubicly distance themselves from MOG. The first part was done but the recent interview showed the Officers saw nothing wrong with the article
What's really interesting is that in the interview Fuat Kircaali says that the O'Gara article was pulled solely on account of the DoS attack and not because of any ethical concerns over the content or style of the article, but as of yesterday the LBN website has a top-banner apology saying that they pulled the article because of ethical concerns. Was he lying then, or is he lying now?
Apparently, you didn't read it very well. The excellent book was about a kid coping with autism, not Asberger's
Actually, the book never mentions Christopher's condition explicitly. One of the "I loved it" quotes inside the front cover suggested that it was an interesting look inside an autistic mind.
I have discussed this book at length with my friends at www.wrongplanet.net, and we pretty much agreed (I think) that the character Christopher is a somewhat distorted representation of all facets of the autism spectrum, in that he seems to have low-functioning autism one moment and high-functioning autism or Asperger's Syndrome the next. Like "Rainman", he is both an amalgam and a caricature.
Like the other Aspies who read the book, I closely identified with some of his experiences and thought "WTF?" about others.
Exactly how would a National ID Card make people safer?
It wouldn't, at least as long as the borders are open and nobody checks your ID for internal travel.
I just got back from a week in Paris. The "immigration" officer barely even glanced at my passport, and definitely did not scan the OCR strip like every other country I've ever visited. They didn't even stamp my entry until I handed them the passport a second time and requested one (I cut out the stamps and put them in my photo album once the passport expires).
They had geographical searching. You could input your location and interest, and it would tell you where groups were located, starting at your location and working outward. Yahoo groups can't do that. The yahoo and geocities sites are also full of spam, popups and advertising.
Meetup.com hosted groups for all sorts of reasons, including enthusiast groups for hobbies (slashdot.meetup.com) and support groups for the people and families dealing with disabilities (autism.meetup.com), so to characterize this just pimping the digital date scene is a bit simplistic.
That's the way it works in Vancouver. There's nobody on the train (except when conducting ticket checks to find cheaters), but every second or third platform has at least one employee, and the busy platforms have several. If a train is disabled at a station for any reason, the up-line station crew will ride the opposite-direction train over and take charge.
We really don't have problems with people blocking the doors. The transit police carry guns and routinely detain people who cause problems on the line.
1: In some cases, the bank *is* the card issuer. 2: Different merchants have different reporting methods/rules. Very few are doing end-of-day batching now -- it's easier to get the confirmation electronically on-the-spot, in which case the details of the charge are immediately sent. For these two reasons, I routinely see my credit card charges on my bank's on-line banking site (complete with merchant ID or address) within 24 hours. I have made quite a few on-line purchases. The only time I ever had a problem it was because someone at a gas station double-swiped my card. The bank called me about 30 minutes after the card was used in Hong Kong.
Go us! Now the question on everybody's mind up here is: with our refusal to put our official support behind the missile defense program and now this, how long before the border closes up completely?
The border is already effectively closed as far as I'm concerned. The USA has REPEATEDLY lost their battles over softwood tariffs and beef import restrictions and yet the politicians down there are still blocking imports by simply throwing up new laws/rules that they *know* will eventually be struck down again. NAFTA is a complete failure from the Canadian perspective as the "free flow of goods and services" is apparently only a one-way deal.
There is a growing sentiment up here that we should no longer offer the USA preferential access to our natural resources. If you don't want our lumber or our beef, why should we be paying high electric rates to subsidise California? Why should we be shipping our fresh water south by the truckload?
I (and many other Canadians) have stopped going to the USA on vacation. I now give my tourist dollars to countries in Asia, Europe and elsewhere.
...is it entirely possible to sell server's pre-configured with proprietary software packages on a GNU/Linux operating system?
Of course it is. You can include both proprietary drivers and proprietary applications on a delivered Linux box. The only restriction is that you can't use GPL'd software as the basis for the proprietary code.
My point about VARs is that the profit margin when selling generic hardware with open-source drivers will be very low compared to the profit margin when selling advanced hardware with proprietary drivers simply because you lose your leverage when the same product is available across the street selling at or near cost. This is fine when the product in question is already a commodity, but a significant loss of profit when a product is new enough and exclusive enough to appeal to the early adopters.
Reading the national publication (this was in Canada), a major concern seemed to be low membership. It seemed to me that the 98th percentile and above thing was something of an impediment to increasing membership.
It probably doesn't help that the people at the very top of the intellectual food chain have no interest in membership in an ego-stroking society. Most of the geniuses I know are (for the most part) antisocial eccentrics who care more about their work than what goes on in the world around them. I personally took their entrance exam (and passed) almost 25 years ago. I didn't see much point in joining then, and even less now. I have more fun hanging around with "normal" people.
Sorry. Should have been clearer. If Mensa was serious about admitting only the cream of the crop, their testing and admission standards would be more comprehensive and not boil down to a single passing mark.
No, It would simply make the competition fiercer since the difference between products would essecially become the basics, ie. price, features, support etc.
I think that is a "good thing".
My point was that it's currently possible for different vendors to use the same hardware as each other and try to create better software to capture market share. If all drivers were open source then this wouldn't be possible as your competition would download your patches minutes after you uploaded them and then they would have the same suite of tools. Open source drivers requires hardware innovation to maintain market share. Hardware innovation is slower and more expensive than software innovation. As a result, prices go up and product improvements take place on a longer cycle. Vendors with closed-source drivers have an incentive to stay that way so that they can keep their feature list ahead of the competition.
From a manufacturer's perspective, releasing open-source drivers is a great way to kill VAR interest in your product, since the only place a VAR can add value is in the software or in support, and most people won't pay extra for support.
Although I understand that NDAs can be involved, it often amazes me that hardware manufacturers keep to closed driver implementations.
In a lot of cases the hardware is pretty simple and the functionality that differentiates their product is all located in the driver. Think "WinModem". Releasing the driver as open source can take a way a competetive advantage in that case.
Re:MENSA is not THAT smart..
on
MSN Sponsors Mensa
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Though some people suggest defining intelligence as what IQ measures...
The tests for IQ have been changing a lot over the last few decades. Groups like Mensa pretend there's only one score and admit based on that value. If you were to get a proper psychological work-up the doctors would actually conduct several different IQ tests (to measure verbal, performance and average IQ) and then list specific IQ values for each portion of each test. They can then compare, say, your "math IQ" to your "logic IQ" to make determinations about your personality and actual skills. In particular, they look at the variances to determine where a person is gifted and where they are developmentally delayed. You could have a verbal IQ of 140 and a performance IQ of 60 and a traditional test would say you were "normal" (your IQ was 100) when you're actually autistic....
The other thing that has changed about the IQ tests is the method and rating scale. Older IQ tests (even from the 80's) were biased in favour of a bell-curve result so that two people of similar near-average intelligence would be significantly contrasted while the difference between the "bright" and the "super genius" was compacted. Anyone who scores more than about 140 on a general IQ test should get re-tested using a more modern (more linear and usually open-ended scale) test designed to measure accurately at higher levels.
And car dealerships always love cash because that means all the money from the sale is going to them and not partly to a bank over a period of 5 years (or at least that's my theory, although I do know for a fact that they love cash.)
In the days before 0% it was common for auto dealers to charge MORE for cash sales because they had to make up for the lost interest income.
BTW, our vendor found "one more bug" late in December 1999.
Where I work (air traffic control) we did extensive testing for two or three years prior to the big event. Most of our major systems were unaffected or easily corrected, although about 20% of the corporate desktops were red-flagged.
We did have one legacy system that we couldn't replace that was known to be a problem. The short-term solution was to roll back the clock to 1972 (the last leap year that started on a Saturday). Everything was fine for about 4 months. Then one day all the flight plans were wrong.
After some investigation it was determined that the shift to daylight savings time in 1972 was on a different weekend than the one in 2000. Normally that wouldnt't be a problem as all aviation-related time and date fields are stored in UTC form. This particular computer, however, was responsible for automatically injecting the scheduled carrier flights into the flight-data system on a daily basis so the airlines wouldn't have to send new flight plans all the time. When the clocks change in the spring and fall, the airlines shift their schedule by one hour UTC so that the 7:00 AM (local) flight still takes off at 7:00 AM. Since this computer thought it was daylight savings time a week or two early, it added one hour to all of the proposed departure times just like it was supposed to do.
We don't normally send flight plans to the computer more than an hour before departure, so the airlines were loading the passengers, closing the doors, and then finding out there was no record of the flight with ATC. The controllers would hand-write the flight data strip and send the aircraft on its way, only to have the computer-generated flight data strip pop out shortly thereafter.
This bug was very easy to fix, but obviously very difficult to predict.
So I went down to the local rental place, and made them a deal. I simply told them that I would like a car every weekend starting on Friday evening and that I would bring it back Sunday. I let them keep the deposit on file. They got steady business, I got whatever I needed (a clean, maintained car, truck, SUV, or convertible).
One of the local Vancouver newspapers ran a story a month or two ago suggesting that anyone who's had more than one or two accidents (and is therefore stuck with high insurance premiums), getting a gold card that offers free auto insurance and using it to rent a vehicle on a month-by-month basis may be cheaper than buying a car and insuring it. You avoid the up-front capitalization of a lease or purchase and don't have to worry about the lease termination fees. You also get to "trade-in" as often as you want. If you go away on vacation you just drop off the car and stop paying for it. It's not for everyone, but it certainly has some appeal.
I saw Charles do his OMSWT show at the Vancouver Fringe Festival (held over, twice). Although 20 minutes per episode seems very short, if you actually read the transcripts of the movies you quickly realize how many scenes contain little or no dialog and can be cut or shortened to a 2-second sound effect. What's really impressive is the extra little goodies he adds to each story as he pokes fun at the characters and/or the actors who originally played the parts.
Another good candidate would be The Matrix trilogy -- you can read each transcript in about 20 minutes. Less if you skip over Keanu's "Whoa" lines...:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Nah. That's what fetchmail and dyndns.org are for. I grab all my Shaw email and store it on my home machine inside the Shaw network. Thanks to ssh I can read and send email from pretty much anywhere in the world except the People's Republic of China.
According to Microsoft, "innovation" and "R&D" are all about training CS students to use Microsoft software instead of all of those old-fashioned languages and operating systems.
0 03Aug24
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40000-2
At least *some* of the universities had the foresight to turn down Microsoft's bribe.
I have one PC with a hyper-threading P4 and the recent Knoppix and Ubuntu live CD's I've tried lately all fail to boot. The LILO screen works and the kernel loads, but almost immediately I get a flood of error messages about IRQ 18 and then the kernels all hang or slowly repeat the errors over and over again.
I read a story last week (sorry, no URL) that said the U.S. military was considering dropping the tattoo ban, at least temporarily, in order to widen the pool of available applicants for voluntary service during the "war on terror". It seems they're a few tens of thousands of soldiers short....
The Chicago Sun-Times also ran a story today on the issue of tattoos and piercings in the workplace. They say that it's becoming more acceptable.
It could simply be that Castro wants to improve national security by ensuring there are no back doors through which the American 3-letter agencies can spy on the Cuban government....
What's really interesting is that in the interview Fuat Kircaali says that the O'Gara article was pulled solely on account of the DoS attack and not because of any ethical concerns over the content or style of the article, but as of yesterday the LBN website has a top-banner apology saying that they pulled the article because of ethical concerns. Was he lying then, or is he lying now?
Actually, the book never mentions Christopher's condition explicitly. One of the "I loved it" quotes inside the front cover suggested that it was an interesting look inside an autistic mind.
I have discussed this book at length with my friends at www.wrongplanet.net, and we pretty much agreed (I think) that the character Christopher is a somewhat distorted representation of all facets of the autism spectrum, in that he seems to have low-functioning autism one moment and high-functioning autism or Asperger's Syndrome the next. Like "Rainman", he is both an amalgam and a caricature.
Like the other Aspies who read the book, I closely identified with some of his experiences and thought "WTF?" about others.
It wouldn't, at least as long as the borders are open and nobody checks your ID for internal travel.
I just got back from a week in Paris. The "immigration" officer barely even glanced at my passport, and definitely did not scan the OCR strip like every other country I've ever visited. They didn't even stamp my entry until I handed them the passport a second time and requested one (I cut out the stamps and put them in my photo album once the passport expires).
They had geographical searching. You could input your location and interest, and it would tell you where groups were located, starting at your location and working outward. Yahoo groups can't do that. The yahoo and geocities sites are also full of spam, popups and advertising.
Meetup.com hosted groups for all sorts of reasons, including enthusiast groups for hobbies (slashdot.meetup.com) and support groups for the people and families dealing with disabilities (autism.meetup.com), so to characterize this just pimping the digital date scene is a bit simplistic.
That's the way it works in Vancouver. There's nobody on the train (except when conducting ticket checks to find cheaters), but every second or third platform has at least one employee, and the busy platforms have several. If a train is disabled at a station for any reason, the up-line station crew will ride the opposite-direction train over and take charge. We really don't have problems with people blocking the doors. The transit police carry guns and routinely detain people who cause problems on the line.
1: In some cases, the bank *is* the card issuer.
2: Different merchants have different reporting methods/rules. Very few are doing end-of-day batching now -- it's easier to get the confirmation electronically on-the-spot, in which case the details of the charge are immediately sent.
For these two reasons, I routinely see my credit card charges on my bank's on-line banking site (complete with merchant ID or address) within 24 hours.
I have made quite a few on-line purchases. The only time I ever had a problem it was because someone at a gas station double-swiped my card. The bank called me about 30 minutes after the card was used in Hong Kong.
The border is already effectively closed as far as I'm concerned. The USA has REPEATEDLY lost their battles over softwood tariffs and beef import restrictions and yet the politicians down there are still blocking imports by simply throwing up new laws/rules that they *know* will eventually be struck down again. NAFTA is a complete failure from the Canadian perspective as the "free flow of goods and services" is apparently only a one-way deal.
There is a growing sentiment up here that we should no longer offer the USA preferential access to our natural resources. If you don't want our lumber or our beef, why should we be paying high electric rates to subsidise California? Why should we be shipping our fresh water south by the truckload?
I (and many other Canadians) have stopped going to the USA on vacation. I now give my tourist dollars to countries in Asia, Europe and elsewhere.
Of course it is. You can include both proprietary drivers and proprietary applications on a delivered Linux box. The only restriction is that you can't use GPL'd software as the basis for the proprietary code.
My point about VARs is that the profit margin when selling generic hardware with open-source drivers will be very low compared to the profit margin when selling advanced hardware with proprietary drivers simply because you lose your leverage when the same product is available across the street selling at or near cost. This is fine when the product in question is already a commodity, but a significant loss of profit when a product is new enough and exclusive enough to appeal to the early adopters.
It probably doesn't help that the people at the very top of the intellectual food chain have no interest in membership in an ego-stroking society. Most of the geniuses I know are (for the most part) antisocial eccentrics who care more about their work than what goes on in the world around them. I personally took their entrance exam (and passed) almost 25 years ago. I didn't see much point in joining then, and even less now. I have more fun hanging around with "normal" people.
Sorry. Should have been clearer. If Mensa was serious about admitting only the cream of the crop, their testing and admission standards would be more comprehensive and not boil down to a single passing mark.
My point was that it's currently possible for different vendors to use the same hardware as each other and try to create better software to capture market share. If all drivers were open source then this wouldn't be possible as your competition would download your patches minutes after you uploaded them and then they would have the same suite of tools. Open source drivers requires hardware innovation to maintain market share. Hardware innovation is slower and more expensive than software innovation. As a result, prices go up and product improvements take place on a longer cycle. Vendors with closed-source drivers have an incentive to stay that way so that they can keep their feature list ahead of the competition.
From a manufacturer's perspective, releasing open-source drivers is a great way to kill VAR interest in your product, since the only place a VAR can add value is in the software or in support, and most people won't pay extra for support.
In a lot of cases the hardware is pretty simple and the functionality that differentiates their product is all located in the driver. Think "WinModem". Releasing the driver as open source can take a way a competetive advantage in that case.
The tests for IQ have been changing a lot over the last few decades. Groups like Mensa pretend there's only one score and admit based on that value. If you were to get a proper psychological work-up the doctors would actually conduct several different IQ tests (to measure verbal, performance and average IQ) and then list specific IQ values for each portion of each test. They can then compare, say, your "math IQ" to your "logic IQ" to make determinations about your personality and actual skills. In particular, they look at the variances to determine where a person is gifted and where they are developmentally delayed. You could have a verbal IQ of 140 and a performance IQ of 60 and a traditional test would say you were "normal" (your IQ was 100) when you're actually autistic....
The other thing that has changed about the IQ tests is the method and rating scale. Older IQ tests (even from the 80's) were biased in favour of a bell-curve result so that two people of similar near-average intelligence would be significantly contrasted while the difference between the "bright" and the "super genius" was compacted. Anyone who scores more than about 140 on a general IQ test should get re-tested using a more modern (more linear and usually open-ended scale) test designed to measure accurately at higher levels.
In the days before 0% it was common for auto dealers to charge MORE for cash sales because they had to make up for the lost interest income.
Maybe it's the wine I've been sipping all night, but I read that as "political dysentary". Then again, maybe alcohol *does* bring insight.
Most of the time "Crossfile" seems to be less about politics than about publicity for the hosts.
Where I work (air traffic control) we did extensive testing for two or three years prior to the big event. Most of our major systems were unaffected or easily corrected, although about 20% of the corporate desktops were red-flagged.
We did have one legacy system that we couldn't replace that was known to be a problem. The short-term solution was to roll back the clock to 1972 (the last leap year that started on a Saturday). Everything was fine for about 4 months. Then one day all the flight plans were wrong.
After some investigation it was determined that the shift to daylight savings time in 1972 was on a different weekend than the one in 2000. Normally that wouldnt't be a problem as all aviation-related time and date fields are stored in UTC form. This particular computer, however, was responsible for automatically injecting the scheduled carrier flights into the flight-data system on a daily basis so the airlines wouldn't have to send new flight plans all the time. When the clocks change in the spring and fall, the airlines shift their schedule by one hour UTC so that the 7:00 AM (local) flight still takes off at 7:00 AM. Since this computer thought it was daylight savings time a week or two early, it added one hour to all of the proposed departure times just like it was supposed to do.
We don't normally send flight plans to the computer more than an hour before departure, so the airlines were loading the passengers, closing the doors, and then finding out there was no record of the flight with ATC. The controllers would hand-write the flight data strip and send the aircraft on its way, only to have the computer-generated flight data strip pop out shortly thereafter.
This bug was very easy to fix, but obviously very difficult to predict.
There's a pub-quiz system that's already in thousands of bars in North America called "NTN".
One of the local Vancouver newspapers ran a story a month or two ago suggesting that anyone who's had more than one or two accidents (and is therefore stuck with high insurance premiums), getting a gold card that offers free auto insurance and using it to rent a vehicle on a month-by-month basis may be cheaper than buying a car and insuring it. You avoid the up-front capitalization of a lease or purchase and don't have to worry about the lease termination fees. You also get to "trade-in" as often as you want. If you go away on vacation you just drop off the car and stop paying for it. It's not for everyone, but it certainly has some appeal.
Another good candidate would be The Matrix trilogy -- you can read each transcript in about 20 minutes. Less if you skip over Keanu's "Whoa" lines... :-)