It may be naive of me -- he may just have a really good image consultant -- but he gives the impression, at least, that he talks straight and takes shit from nobody.
It is naive of you. His people spent a lot of entertainment-industry dollars make sure you were given that impression.
This is not an attack specifically at you, Daniel, but it's sad that we have come to the point where somebody who manages to watch an episode or two of "Frontline" on PBS now and then is considered a well-informed voter, by way of contrast to most people, who seem to get most of thier political information from Saturday Night Live sketches.
Note to everybody: If you spent more time this month thinking about Michael Jackson's sex scandals than US foreign policy and the tax code, please do us all a favor and don't vote. Thank you.
Far be it from me to rush to Dell's defense about anything, but this could just be a case of spammers brute-forcing all the likely "@dell.com" addresses. It happens with all popular e-mail domains, eventually.
In space 1000 km is right on top of you. I mean, good grief, Apollo 13 did the alignment for a return burn of 350,000 km by eyeballing it through the command capsule window.
"On top of you," perhaps. Visible to the naked eye? Not likely, unless you are either emitting or reflecting a lot of light.
Why would their corporate clients care if they outsource? They're probably doing the same thing.
So, if a bank's outsourced tech support worker in Bangalore calls the hardware support for his PC computer and gets an outsourced product support worker in Bangalore, does he get mad?
More importantly, is the call spanning the Ocean twice?
All of the major support center staffing companies in Bangalore hire language coaches which even go to the lengths of teaching American slang and selecting western-sounding pseudonyms, in hopes of fooling callers into thinking they are talking to somebody frome somewhere like Indianapolis instead of India. It works pretty well for brief conversations, but when troubleshooting a difficult issue just about anybody is bound to revert to their normal speaking patterns.
If Dell is leaving, it's because they didn't end up realizing enough of a savings to justify losses to their business. If you want to pay out 10 to 1 on a bet that they will go back there to get burned again within 5 years, please contact me. I'd like to put down a few hundred bucks on that one. They might try another outsourcing method (prisoners are a popular source of telemarketing labor these days), but they won't go back to those companies. As you say "Money is money. Bottom line."
"Would you please not to delete this file?" What you expect to answer depends on your dialect. I'm dead serious on this.
In any part of America, "would you please not to delete this file?" is incorrect grammar. Hiring local programmers does not help your cause if you hire illiterate ones.
Re:And a third-party iPod battery costs... $50.
on
"iPod's Dirty Secret"
·
· Score: 1
Apparently adding NuBus cards to a DuoDock was a nightmare as well.
I've done that, and it was a pain... but still easier than swapping the HD in my eMac.
But that's been done before, most notably in 2001: a Space Odyssey and 2010.
A few other movies, too... but on TV it's unheard of.
And, most of the space science in Firefly was really really bad. They confused solar systems with galaxies, for crying out loud!
Uh, no they didn't. The opening dialog referred to "the system", and there are frequent references to "the inner worlds" or "the inner/outer planets", but it's clear from the context of the show that they are not speaking about a solar system, but using slang to refer to distance from Galactic Central Point (just as deep space is referred to as "the black"). Just because you got confused about what they were talking about doesn't mean that they did.
And the space science in Firefly was the best on TV ever. A great example would be the episode when somebody disabled Firefly's engines. The ship did not stop; it kept drifting in the direction it was going.
Shortly afterwards, when the ship was under attack, they decided to use Jayne's shotgun through the airlock, since it was the biggest weapon they had access to (the Firefly was an unarmed freighter ship). Since the shotgun needed O2 environment to fire, there was a very amusing scene of Jayne hanging out the airlock with his hand up the ass of a spacesuit in which the gun was enclosed, shooting a short burst of slugs through the visor glass.
How many Star Trek episodes have you seen where ships come to a skidding halt when the warp engines fail? I'm sure I've seen at least a dozen. How often have sci-fi shows forgotten about simple things like the need for oxygen in order to burn gunpowder?
Or "We snuck up on the space station by coasting in from a whole thousand kilometers away." There were other examples.
A chunk of random debris the size of the Firefly, 1000 km away, would not be particularly alarming. Firefly was a small enough ship that it's plausible that such a deception might work, especially against somebody who's just looking at something like radar blips as opposed to the magical "Long Range Scanners - On The Bridge Display" of Star Trek. Even with a solar system, something as small as the Firefly probably would not be visible without a telescope at that distance. We are talking about over 600 miles here. Man-made satellites which are barely visible at night from Earth are much, much closer than that.
For one, the Internet was built almost concurrently with the birth and growth of BBS culture. That it "came along" to you only years later is no excuse to claim instant triumph of a relatively new culture over an established, albeit different, one.
I was on the Internet in the days of BBS culture, via my University computer lab. Before the web, we weren't constantly running across assholes trying to redefine what commonly used words mean to match up with their odd notions of what they "should" mean.
Another thing is, university people had used the term "hacker" for decades before BBS and home computer culture was even possible. Widely and repeatedly. They also tend to have more coherent and accurate definitions for the word than your average home delinquent.
In that context, it typically referred to somebody who was incompetent. "Hacker" as a reference to a remarkably ingenious seat-of-the-pants programmer was a much later development.
This, I believe, gives good reason for several people to be offended when newcomers claim that a term they use of perfectly respectable people should in fact be re-enacted to mean the networking equivalent of a burglar!
Not nearly as offensive as referring to somebody as a "newcomer" when they are probably as old as you and were present for much of the same history, simply because we did not become aware of each other until places/. became commonplace.
Furthermore, the word "slave" is derived from "Slav"; a reference to the fact that most captive workers during the Middle Ages were from the Slavic regions of Europe (Bohemia, Moravia, and Northeastern Europe).
If "slave" is a racial reference at all, it's at me, not at my African-American brothers, who were typically called by another word entirely in the pre-abolition South, one which nobody would consider using as a technical term for media drives.
Since I don't mind the use of the word "slave," and most other Europeans probably don't mind, you can feel free to go back to using it, LA County. Enjoy!
You are also wrong. Apple's iTunes does not encode DRM when you rip your CD's to AAC. You can copy them as freely as any MP3 or OGG file.
Only songs from the iTunes Music Store are encoded with DRM.
So, to summarize: AAC does not mean DRM. iTunes AAC encodings do not mean DRM. Songs purchased from the iTMS, which come in the AAC format, include DRM, but permit copying for fair use, so long as you don't have it loaded on more than a few computers at the same time.
Servers stop operating when no power is getting to them! If you are a dial-up customer to an ISP who has no power, you might have trouble connecting! More on this crisis as it develops.
In other news, Generalissimo Franco is still dead.
What's special about it is not the genre. Any space-based sci-fi is going to have spacecrafts and futuristic technology. Saying "it's been done before" would be like looking at "Everybody Loves Raymond" and saying "How is this different from the Dick Van Dyke Show!?"
What makes Firefly worth watching is that it's a well written, well acted, and well-directed show, featuring production values that were about as good as you are likely to see on TV, and story arcs which were entertaining to follow.
That said, there were differences. Firefly paid much closer attention to physics than any TV sci-fi I've ever seen, and had a very rich back-story that easilly stands up against B5 or Farscape. It was certainly an order of magnitude better than either of the last two Star Trek series to emerge from Paramount. When the DVD set comes out next month, borrow it from a friend or something and see for yourself.
Like I said, I was able to come up with one example of how Firefly was different in about 2 seconds. A trivial difference, but I was just demonstrating that the original post was utter nonsense.
It's about time. After much complaining from iPod owners, Apple has finally started an official Official iPod Battery replacement
Is this a response to complaints, or is it just possible that we are just now reaching the time when some of the third-generation iPods are getting old enough for Apple to actually need this program?
But that would mean tha all previous whining was just a speculative over-reaction to "you can't replace the battery" FUD, and we can't go thinking that now, can we?
The unicorn dream and Gant's origami unicorn = "We are monitoring your dreams"
No, the unicorn dream and Gant's origami unicorn means "we gave you your dreams." Subtle difference, but an important one to us geeky, pimple-faced fanboys.
W00t! Nobody can ever complain about me saying "Virii" or "Boxen" again!!!1!1!
Seriously, though... the whole hacker/cracker thing is something that spawned from one small subculture of homebrew computer users in one part of the country. In my BBS days, nearly everybody from my part of the country used "hacker" to refer to people who break into systems they don't own. "Cracker" only applied to people who broke copy protection code in commercial software. Ten years later, the web comes along, and I stumble across people stomping their feet and telling me that the way the word has always been used around me is Wrong Wrong Wrong! Whatever, dude. UC-B and MIT are not the whole world.
Re:so cool
on
iPod-Jacked
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
so, what does this have to do with the ipod? we've had walkmen for 20 years or so
The walkman could not store your entire CD library, sorted into playlists of your favorite singles.
Walk up to somebody listening to a CD player, and they are probably listening to some deep track on the B side of an album, and the song itself tells you very little about them.
Walk up to somebody listening to any high-capacity MP3 player that's sorted into playlists, and they are probably listening to one of their favorite songs at the moment you interrupt them.
In my book, that's infinitely cooler... although there is the risk that somebody wants to hear what you are listening to at the very moment you are playing something off your "guilty pleasures" list (say, for example, "All The Things She Said", by t.A.T.u., that fake-lesbian pop duo from last year), leading to "you listen to that!?" awkwardness. People who worry about such a thing would always be listening to what they want to be seen listening to whenever they are out on the sidewalk.
In your original post, you were implying that using these tactics against the Mafia was something new, which it obviously isn't. That's what I was talking about.
You're amazed at how little notice this has gotten? Apart from the war in Iraq and the economic slump, it's just about the only thing Democrats talk about!
Why is 'soccer mom' such a popular term? I mean, do a lot of kids in America play soccer?
In the American suburbs, just about every young child, male or female, plays soccer. The term "soccer mom" became a generic term for suburbanite married women with children, who tend to have slightly more conservative values than the single, urban feminist. The stereotype is a reasonably prosperous middle-class thirtysomething woman who drives a big SUV or Minivan to take her kids to soccer practice.
While most urban women in recent decades have tended to vote as a block for one party (Democrats), the "soccer moms" are considered to be important swing voters, and both parties have been spending a lot of time, money, and energy trying to win their votes in recent years. (Bill Clinton did very well with the soccer moms, much to Bob Dole's surprise and disappointment.)
If it didn't have Simson Garfinkle's byline, I'd think the whole thing was pure bullshit made up by a Bushie purely as propoganda to prove the need to use their patriot muscle to crack down on "regular" crime.
Uh... no.
The whole point of the PATRIOT Act was to apply RICO-syle tactics of enforcement (which have already been used against the mob for years now) against suspected terrorists. You've got it exactly backwards.
Whatever. I turned off desktop icons for my local drives. The new Finder window is good enough that putting drives on your desktop is pointless clutter for anybody other than OS9 zealots who just can't bring themselves to let go of their Old School ways.
(FYI: What gests displayed on the desktop can be controlled via the Preferences in the Finder menu.)
Slashdot Mirror
It is naive of you. His people spent a lot of entertainment-industry dollars make sure you were given that impression.
This is not an attack specifically at you, Daniel, but it's sad that we have come to the point where somebody who manages to watch an episode or two of "Frontline" on PBS now and then is considered a well-informed voter, by way of contrast to most people, who seem to get most of thier political information from Saturday Night Live sketches.
Note to everybody: If you spent more time this month thinking about Michael Jackson's sex scandals than US foreign policy and the tax code, please do us all a favor and don't vote. Thank you.
Far be it from me to rush to Dell's defense about anything, but this could just be a case of spammers brute-forcing all the likely "@dell.com" addresses. It happens with all popular e-mail domains, eventually.
"On top of you," perhaps. Visible to the naked eye? Not likely, unless you are either emitting or reflecting a lot of light.
Accented a: 0x61
"gze" sound: 0x670x7a0x65
That was easy!
So, if a bank's outsourced tech support worker in Bangalore calls the hardware support for his PC computer and gets an outsourced product support worker in Bangalore, does he get mad?
More importantly, is the call spanning the Ocean twice?
If Dell is leaving, it's because they didn't end up realizing enough of a savings to justify losses to their business. If you want to pay out 10 to 1 on a bet that they will go back there to get burned again within 5 years, please contact me. I'd like to put down a few hundred bucks on that one. They might try another outsourcing method (prisoners are a popular source of telemarketing labor these days), but they won't go back to those companies. As you say "Money is money. Bottom line."
What you expect to answer depends on your dialect. I'm dead serious on this.
In any part of America, "would you please not to delete this file?" is incorrect grammar. Hiring local programmers does not help your cause if you hire illiterate ones.
I've done that, and it was a pain... but still easier than swapping the HD in my eMac.
A few other movies, too... but on TV it's unheard of.
And, most of the space science in Firefly was really really bad. They confused solar systems with galaxies, for crying out loud!
Uh, no they didn't. The opening dialog referred to "the system", and there are frequent references to "the inner worlds" or "the inner/outer planets", but it's clear from the context of the show that they are not speaking about a solar system, but using slang to refer to distance from Galactic Central Point (just as deep space is referred to as "the black"). Just because you got confused about what they were talking about doesn't mean that they did.
And the space science in Firefly was the best on TV ever. A great example would be the episode when somebody disabled Firefly's engines. The ship did not stop; it kept drifting in the direction it was going.
Shortly afterwards, when the ship was under attack, they decided to use Jayne's shotgun through the airlock, since it was the biggest weapon they had access to (the Firefly was an unarmed freighter ship). Since the shotgun needed O2 environment to fire, there was a very amusing scene of Jayne hanging out the airlock with his hand up the ass of a spacesuit in which the gun was enclosed, shooting a short burst of slugs through the visor glass.
How many Star Trek episodes have you seen where ships come to a skidding halt when the warp engines fail? I'm sure I've seen at least a dozen. How often have sci-fi shows forgotten about simple things like the need for oxygen in order to burn gunpowder?
Or "We snuck up on the space station by coasting in from a whole thousand kilometers away." There were other examples.
A chunk of random debris the size of the Firefly, 1000 km away, would not be particularly alarming. Firefly was a small enough ship that it's plausible that such a deception might work, especially against somebody who's just looking at something like radar blips as opposed to the magical "Long Range Scanners - On The Bridge Display" of Star Trek. Even with a solar system, something as small as the Firefly probably would not be visible without a telescope at that distance. We are talking about over 600 miles here. Man-made satellites which are barely visible at night from Earth are much, much closer than that.
I was on the Internet in the days of BBS culture, via my University computer lab. Before the web, we weren't constantly running across assholes trying to redefine what commonly used words mean to match up with their odd notions of what they "should" mean.
Another thing is, university people had used the term "hacker" for decades before BBS and home computer culture was even possible. Widely and repeatedly. They also tend to have more coherent and accurate definitions for the word than your average home delinquent.
In that context, it typically referred to somebody who was incompetent. "Hacker" as a reference to a remarkably ingenious seat-of-the-pants programmer was a much later development.
This, I believe, gives good reason for several people to be offended when newcomers claim that a term they use of perfectly respectable people should in fact be re-enacted to mean the networking equivalent of a burglar!
Not nearly as offensive as referring to somebody as a "newcomer" when they are probably as old as you and were present for much of the same history, simply because we did not become aware of each other until places /. became commonplace.
If "slave" is a racial reference at all, it's at me, not at my African-American brothers, who were typically called by another word entirely in the pre-abolition South, one which nobody would consider using as a technical term for media drives.
Since I don't mind the use of the word "slave," and most other Europeans probably don't mind, you can feel free to go back to using it, LA County. Enjoy!
Only songs from the iTunes Music Store are encoded with DRM.
So, to summarize:
AAC does not mean DRM.
iTunes AAC encodings do not mean DRM.
Songs purchased from the iTMS, which come in the AAC format, include DRM, but permit copying for fair use, so long as you don't have it loaded on more than a few computers at the same time.
Any questions, class?
In other news, Generalissimo Franco is still dead.
What makes Firefly worth watching is that it's a well written, well acted, and well-directed show, featuring production values that were about as good as you are likely to see on TV, and story arcs which were entertaining to follow.
That said, there were differences. Firefly paid much closer attention to physics than any TV sci-fi I've ever seen, and had a very rich back-story that easilly stands up against B5 or Farscape. It was certainly an order of magnitude better than either of the last two Star Trek series to emerge from Paramount. When the DVD set comes out next month, borrow it from a friend or something and see for yourself.
Like I said, I was able to come up with one example of how Firefly was different in about 2 seconds. A trivial difference, but I was just demonstrating that the original post was utter nonsense.
Is this a response to complaints, or is it just possible that we are just now reaching the time when some of the third-generation iPods are getting old enough for Apple to actually need this program?
But that would mean tha all previous whining was just a speculative over-reaction to "you can't replace the battery" FUD, and we can't go thinking that now, can we?
1. Unlike Star Trek, Farscape, and Battlestar Galactica, there was no sound in outer space.
There are more differences, but I only need one to show that you didn't think very hard, so I'll stop there.
No, the unicorn dream and Gant's origami unicorn means "we gave you your dreams." Subtle difference, but an important one to us geeky, pimple-faced fanboys.
W00t! Nobody can ever complain about me saying "Virii" or "Boxen" again!!!1!1!
Seriously, though... the whole hacker/cracker thing is something that spawned from one small subculture of homebrew computer users in one part of the country. In my BBS days, nearly everybody from my part of the country used "hacker" to refer to people who break into systems they don't own. "Cracker" only applied to people who broke copy protection code in commercial software. Ten years later, the web comes along, and I stumble across people stomping their feet and telling me that the way the word has always been used around me is Wrong Wrong Wrong! Whatever, dude. UC-B and MIT are not the whole world.
The walkman could not store your entire CD library, sorted into playlists of your favorite singles.
Walk up to somebody listening to a CD player, and they are probably listening to some deep track on the B side of an album, and the song itself tells you very little about them.
Walk up to somebody listening to any high-capacity MP3 player that's sorted into playlists, and they are probably listening to one of their favorite songs at the moment you interrupt them.
In my book, that's infinitely cooler... although there is the risk that somebody wants to hear what you are listening to at the very moment you are playing something off your "guilty pleasures" list (say, for example, "All The Things She Said", by t.A.T.u., that fake-lesbian pop duo from last year), leading to "you listen to that!?" awkwardness. People who worry about such a thing would always be listening to what they want to be seen listening to whenever they are out on the sidewalk.
You're amazed at how little notice this has gotten? Apart from the war in Iraq and the economic slump, it's just about the only thing Democrats talk about!
In the American suburbs, just about every young child, male or female, plays soccer. The term "soccer mom" became a generic term for suburbanite married women with children, who tend to have slightly more conservative values than the single, urban feminist. The stereotype is a reasonably prosperous middle-class thirtysomething woman who drives a big SUV or Minivan to take her kids to soccer practice.
While most urban women in recent decades have tended to vote as a block for one party (Democrats), the "soccer moms" are considered to be important swing voters, and both parties have been spending a lot of time, money, and energy trying to win their votes in recent years. (Bill Clinton did very well with the soccer moms, much to Bob Dole's surprise and disappointment.)
Uh... no.
The whole point of the PATRIOT Act was to apply RICO-syle tactics of enforcement (which have already been used against the mob for years now) against suspected terrorists. You've got it exactly backwards.
Real Linux/Unix geeks almost never "wade through" text output. We pipe the output to a grep command.
(FYI: What gests displayed on the desktop can be controlled via the Preferences in the Finder menu.)