For some good advice on audiophile-grade systems and equipment try goodsound. I followed their advice and I got a system that sounds better than I ever imagined possible. I did pay over $1k, though - but you can go lower, about $500 for cd, amp and pair of speakers.. or even less if they're used (not a good idea generally if you're not already experienced).
It's not that I didn't like ender's game - i absolutely despise and abhor it. If it wasn't this famous, I wouldn't care - just another crappy book, but the level of reverence is absolutely repugnant! It's worse than crappy - it's crappy and at the same time, you get this impression that author takes it very seriously, like he's writing war and peace or something. Bah! Go read some Heinlein, azimov, le guin, de camp, etc etc etc. Hell even neil stephenson is better than this! I'm not kidding. The book would be funny if it was not so ludicruously serious - two kids post their thoughts on usenet and become major political figures... the kid pretending he's shot down when he's not being an example of greatest tactical genius since Napoleon.. to all of you who think this book is great: boy do you have *alot* to learn! Although I gotta say if I read it when I was 13, I would probably like it.. I know I liked stainless steel and princes of amber at the time.. although either of them is far more sophisticated then
this piece of bird droppings.
Ximian, right?
Heh.. what do they call *you*, 'wheels'?
This is the stupidest thing I ever heard.
Gnome. Wanna get out of my way?
- It's been 15 years, traveling from place to place, hasn't it?
What is this place??
Uh.. the token phrase 'biting the hand that feeds you' implies that you're *not* paying for the food. If you are, it's not really feeding - it's buying, isn't it? For that matter, US gov't buys stuff from alot of companies, should they all be above the law? Interesting.
I'm 21 and I can't stand modern popular music either. I think before music was about music, and now music is about image. Girls are buying spears albums because they want to be like her, while people listened to beatles/whoever (my personal favorite is PF) because they liked their music, period. Think about it, does britney or nsync play thier instruments? Even if they do (i doubt), does anyone care? Does anyone care if they *sing* their songs? Not at all. They're selling an *image*. Sometimes I stop and think, what's it going to be like in 20 years, when most of population will have been raised on such prepackaged images? Let's hope internet saves us;-)
Yeah, there's a good deal of truth in what they're saying. I mean, take win98: it installs to about 200mb, including text editor, wordpad, imaging, gui, connectivity, and generally speaking everything you need to use on a computer without specializing - i.e. if you're graphic designer, you'd add photoshop, if you're a coder, you'd add vc++ or gcc, etc. But generally speaking it's a well rounded package. Now imagine that you're a windows user and your HD is say 2gb with 1 gig taken by random crap.. you pop a debian cd in (the only distribution I know) and 'standard' install is something like 400mb-600mb iirc. Of course feature-for-feature debian beats win98 into a pulp. Vim(or emacs) rock notepad, there's a few free office suits, gimp owns paintbrush, and so on.. They're also generally smaller or about as big as inferior win progs. What baffles me is where space goes - each package seems to be so small but when they add up they take huge amounts of space. Only emacs and X and um kernel and libc are fairly big
- the rest are usually under a meg.. Part of the problem is alot of interdependencies, it may be that we're trading off compactness for speed of development here.. probably a good trade, too. Second, organization is a huge problem. At least, in debian, you're presented with a huge list of possible apps and even though aptitude (which you use after install, to install additional apps) gives you a hierarchial list, it's not hierarchial enough - one branch can have nearly a hundred apps, with no distinction of more essential ones from less so. In other words, this whole mess is optimized for a seasoned user, while it could be optimized for both newbies and seasoned users.. I'm not sure how things are in other distro's but my impression is that install size in them is even bigger. I think I've grown into it but I can sure relate to newbies who feel frightened by this whole thing.. And there's no docs that make it easy! I'd write one but where's the fun in writing docs? Therein lies the problem.. Hey, maybe we
need a nazi distro? The one that cuts out all the nifty extras and leaves a newbie usable system that is tiny and has all the essentials.. might be a good idea. Sorry for ranting off..
Well we got 2 people one of them says 'bah you're just lazy.. if you tried, i mean *really* tried, you could control it' and the other one 'nah it's my genes, if you had genes like that I'd love to see how you handle it'. Who's right? Uh.. that's impossible to tell! We don't know yet, people! How the hell you're going to prove something like that? On a related note, I personally don't have a problem with eating too much: i have a problem with eating enough. It's probably as hard for me to finish that steak as for another guy to keep himself away from second helping. That would seem to point to 'genes' view, but it may well be because I'm just not eating right - but I'm trying to fix that.. Oh yeah, who knows, maybe it's a combination of genes/will power/circumstances? It probably is.
Why would evolution do that? Evolution wants you dead as quick as possible, as soon as you raise a few children. It's our luck that evolution is sloppy, or else we'd die at precisely 35 y.o. or so. Why you ask? One word: adaptability of population - the faster generations change, the quicker can a given population adapt to changing environment. Where do you think the death comes from? There's no inherent reason why a living organism should die unless killed, and yet they all die cause they're programmed so. OTOH, this 'feature' has been with us for so long it's probably distributed over huge amount of genes/mechanisms so it won't be easy to just turn it off. Might take another thousand years so don't get your hopes up:-).
I read it first in a very old russian scifi book (andromeda galaxy by i. efremov) - a very good book too. I believe it was written before 1959 cause he said in the preface that he first guesstimated that what he described will happen in ~3k years, but with the latest news of satellites, he believes it will happen in ~1k years. Incidentally, he is the only russian scifi writer that I enjoy. I think he's somewhat like Lem, not like funny Lem but serious Lem.
Why argue when you can test it? If metcalfe's sure, why don't he start an ISP that charges rate of um, $.10/hour, or something like that? If he's more profitable than flat rate competition, everybody will eventually switch to that system. Frankly, I think flat rate is a bit of a gimmick: it assumes that most people won't take advantage of what it proudly proclaims: as many internet time as you want. The idea is just that even people who use it for 3 hour a month get a bit nervous (hey, what if I do want alot of time one month.. this gives me upper limit of what i'll pay in any case). So, psychologically, if not logically, flat rate is better. But then again, doesn't AOL have $5/month/5hour plan? I do think it's kind of biased, I mean, alot of idlers on irc spend 6-8 hours online every day and they pay $22 for aol and down to $10/month for some other isps, while use.. about 50-60 times more dialup time than users of that aol plan. Well, whatever. As I said, the guy can easily go and start a new isp, he's got
the money. If he's successful all of us internet junkies will be sorry:-)
Do you have a german or a japanese car? Anything electronic in your house made in japan or europe? Well, in case you do, I want you to know: you took bread out of the mouth of children of american workers. These money you paid went outside - americans had seen none of it. Is there a shortage of american cars? Is there a shortage of american electronics? No, not at all - people just buy them when they cost more than similar american gadget.
I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong, although I think you are, but what's important here is that you should be consistent in your views. Fine, you don't like the idea that company hires cheaper coder from india - that's your right. But, stop buying *anything* made outside, because if you do, you are doing the same thing you are blaming congress for. Also, if your point of view prevails, we should also stop all exports - never sell another thing outside, because by doing it we're talking food from foreign workers kid's mouth - and that wouldn't be fair if we forbid them to do the same thing to us. So, how much do you pay for gas for your car? Expect to pay much more, perhaps 50 times more when we stop buying it from overseas. And so on. In general,
Uh, there's like a zillion of these. WindowMaker (I use it), blackbox, icewm are the most popular, then there's fvwm, twm, aewm, and tons more. I use WM because it's about 1/5 mem usage of XF86_SVGA and I think it looks better than Enlightenment and UI is better than that of both GNOME and KDE. Yeah, I know you could use it with them, but that adds bloat and that awkward panel.. But on a slower box i'd probably use blackbox, I heard it's one of the lightest window managers.
Slaves? Uh, no. Look that word up in a dictionary.
Slave is a person who belongs to another person,
any order originated from his master must be
carried out or he'll be lashed. These immigrants
are *employees*. They can quit any fucking time.
Sure, they're confined by the situation with INS/
visa but slavery is quite different. If you were
a real slave in, let's say, 50BC in Rome you would
learn to appreciate the difference:-).
What they are 'worth'? Sorry to disappoint you,
but you are hardly worth $10. 80% of you is water
, some salts, etc. Oh you mean as a *programmer*?
Ever heard of supply/demand? You don't have any
inherent 'worth', you worth as much as companies
are willing to pay you, nothing less, nothing more.
Wake up. Sorry to bring you down.
Huh? Illegal immigrants living on welfare? To
quote simpsons, that's unpossible. Welfare is
only given *legal* immigrants, and not all of
them at that.
Oh, but you can load images in lynx. Here's the
example from/etc/lynx.cfg file:
SUFFIX:.jpg:image/jpeg
SUFFIX:.jpeg:image/jpeg
VIEWER:image/jpeg:display %s&:XWINDOWS
display is a viewer that comes with imagemagick.. there's an alternative - xli and zgv - for console. If there's no link for an image, you should hit '*' which reloads page with links for all inline images. Then, you just click on a link and the image will download and display. On a 28.8, this is the best way - i don't *want* to see 99% of images on webpages.
What if there's a certain technological advance
that every civilization is bound to make, that
effectively wipes it out? For example, a chain
reaction that creates a Nova? Also, it is impos-
sible to predict. Think about it: the way we
find out about the world is, by most part, experi-
mentation. It's quite plausible that one of these
experiments is bound to be performed by *any*
technological civilization. Like splitting the
atom. Which reminds me, when there was a first underwater nuclear test, some scientists feared that it might set off a chain reaction where all of the oceans undergo nuclear reaction (with all the catastrophic consequences). Something like that may still be ahead of us. And, I suppose, it should be fairly close, cause if it wasn't, other civilizations would have time to expand to other planets/solar systems and therefore would be warned about that experiment, which apparently hasn't happened.
First, a disclaimer: I hate f***** Microsoft. Now,
what he probably meant was that, given the FoF by
Jackson, which MS officially doesn't agree with,
this suit was to be expected, and officially they
probably are certain of winning it because they're
certain they will win the first one on appeal.
Of course, this is all official and might be bull,
but what he *said* does not in any way imply any-
thing bad.
Heh. Your assumption here is that indo-european
language conventions will survive longer than
digital encoding conventions. I see no reason to
think so. If we found a slab of rock with charac-
ters written 50k years ago, with no relation to
any modern language, we'd never decode it. How do
you think egyptian language was decoded? They found
a slab where message was written in both greek and
egyptian (written when one of Alexander the Macedonian's heirs was a pharaoh there). Before that, nobody was even close. That's even though whole damn egypt is covered in engravings, and language is still alive (I think). And, that's something like 2500(?) years since it was widely used there to engrave. If they want them to easily learn the language, they have to leave drawings, alot of them. Every word in the dictionary with a visual illustration. Engraved on stainless steel. These guys are probably hoping that either conventions of encoding will survive (which is a bit silly, if they do, why not full archive of the internet?), or that posterity will be much smarter than us.
There's something inherently pathetic about school projects.. They'll tell you to write a calculator, so that you can look at it and say "how much lamer it is than what already is out there, and it took me a few months.." I much prefer the idea of making something that was not done - even if it's impossible to do at this time. It's all in the process, man. Shock them. Say, I want a complete AI, that can talk for 10 minutes without anyone detecting it's a bot. One advantage here is that there will be no students who do the assignment in 15 minutes and then get bored or play quack or IRC.
To make a comletely NL CLI, one would have to create a complete AI first. I hope I don't need to tell you that task is a bit over Microsoft's head. On the other hand, they don't have to make it complete. For instance, a person might type c:>go to my documets folder. And command interpreter should be able to understand it. If they took, let's say, 300 or 400 most common commands people might use, that would be a great help for newbies. It may also say something like "next time when you need to do this, you might want to try shorter command: cd c:\My Documents. Of course, MS being what it is, they will mess it all up somehow, but this is a very interesting direction nevertheless. With all the newbies pouring into Linux, we might want to do the same. As you see, it won't be all that hard to make a list of most common commands people might want to do and try to parse them.
Slashdot Mirror
For some good advice on audiophile-grade systems and equipment try goodsound. I followed their advice and I got a system that sounds better than I ever imagined possible. I did pay over $1k, though - but you can go lower, about $500 for cd, amp and pair of speakers.. or even less if they're used (not a good idea generally if you're not already experienced).
It's not that I didn't like ender's game - i absolutely despise and abhor it. If it wasn't this famous, I wouldn't care - just another crappy book, but the level of reverence is absolutely repugnant! It's worse than crappy - it's crappy and at the same time, you get this impression that author takes it very seriously, like he's writing war and peace or something. Bah! Go read some Heinlein, azimov, le guin, de camp, etc etc etc. Hell even neil stephenson is better than this! I'm not kidding. The book would be funny if it was not so ludicruously serious - two kids post their thoughts on usenet and become major political figures... the kid pretending he's shot down when he's not being an example of greatest tactical genius since Napoleon.. to all of you who think this book is great: boy do you have *alot* to learn! Although I gotta say if I read it when I was 13, I would probably like it.. I know I liked stainless steel and princes of amber at the time.. although either of them is far more sophisticated then
this piece of bird droppings.
Ximian, right?
Heh.. what do they call *you*, 'wheels'?
This is the stupidest thing I ever heard.
Gnome. Wanna get out of my way?
- It's been 15 years, traveling from place to place, hasn't it?
What is this place??
Uh.. the token phrase 'biting the hand that feeds you' implies that you're *not* paying for the food. If you are, it's not really feeding - it's buying, isn't it? For that matter, US gov't buys stuff from alot of companies, should they all be above the law? Interesting.
I'm 21 and I can't stand modern popular music either. I think before music was about music, and now music is about image. Girls are buying spears albums because they want to be like her, while people listened to beatles/whoever (my personal favorite is PF) because they liked their music, period. Think about it, does britney or nsync play thier instruments? Even if they do (i doubt), does anyone care? Does anyone care if they *sing* their songs? Not at all. They're selling an *image*. Sometimes I stop and think, what's it going to be like in 20 years, when most of population will have been raised on such prepackaged images? Let's hope internet saves us ;-)
Yeah, there's a good deal of truth in what they're saying. I mean, take win98: it installs to about 200mb, including text editor, wordpad, imaging, gui, connectivity, and generally speaking everything you need to use on a computer without specializing - i.e. if you're graphic designer, you'd add photoshop, if you're a coder, you'd add vc++ or gcc, etc. But generally speaking it's a well rounded package. Now imagine that you're a windows user and your HD is say 2gb with 1 gig taken by random crap.. you pop a debian cd in (the only distribution I know) and 'standard' install is something like 400mb-600mb iirc. Of course feature-for-feature debian beats win98 into a pulp. Vim(or emacs) rock notepad, there's a few free office suits, gimp owns paintbrush, and so on.. They're also generally smaller or about as big as inferior win progs. What baffles me is where space goes - each package seems to be so small but when they add up they take huge amounts of space. Only emacs and X and um kernel and libc are fairly big
- the rest are usually under a meg.. Part of the problem is alot of interdependencies, it may be that we're trading off compactness for speed of development here.. probably a good trade, too. Second, organization is a huge problem. At least, in debian, you're presented with a huge list of possible apps and even though aptitude (which you use after install, to install additional apps) gives you a hierarchial list, it's not hierarchial enough - one branch can have nearly a hundred apps, with no distinction of more essential ones from less so. In other words, this whole mess is optimized for a seasoned user, while it could be optimized for both newbies and seasoned users.. I'm not sure how things are in other distro's but my impression is that install size in them is even bigger. I think I've grown into it but I can sure relate to newbies who feel frightened by this whole thing.. And there's no docs that make it easy! I'd write one but where's the fun in writing docs? Therein lies the problem.. Hey, maybe we
need a nazi distro? The one that cuts out all the nifty extras and leaves a newbie usable system that is tiny and has all the essentials.. might be a good idea. Sorry for ranting off..
Why, back in my days we used to have porn images jump out on our screens every second.. and we *liked* it!
Well we got 2 people one of them says 'bah you're just lazy.. if you tried, i mean *really* tried, you could control it' and the other one 'nah it's my genes, if you had genes like that I'd love to see how you handle it'. Who's right? Uh.. that's impossible to tell! We don't know yet, people! How the hell you're going to prove something like that? On a related note, I personally don't have a problem with eating too much: i have a problem with eating enough. It's probably as hard for me to finish that steak as for another guy to keep himself away from second helping. That would seem to point to 'genes' view, but it may well be because I'm just not eating right - but I'm trying to fix that.. Oh yeah, who knows, maybe it's a combination of genes/will power/circumstances? It probably is.
Why would evolution do that? Evolution wants you dead as quick as possible, as soon as you raise a few children. It's our luck that evolution is sloppy, or else we'd die at precisely 35 y.o. or so. Why you ask? One word: adaptability of population - the faster generations change, the quicker can a given population adapt to changing environment. Where do you think the death comes from? There's no inherent reason why a living organism should die unless killed, and yet they all die cause they're programmed so. OTOH, this 'feature' has been with us for so long it's probably distributed over huge amount of genes/mechanisms so it won't be easy to just turn it off. Might take another thousand years so don't get your hopes up :-).
I read it first in a very old russian scifi book (andromeda galaxy by i. efremov) - a very good book too. I believe it was written before 1959 cause he said in the preface that he first guesstimated that what he described will happen in ~3k years, but with the latest news of satellites, he believes it will happen in ~1k years. Incidentally, he is the only russian scifi writer that I enjoy. I think he's somewhat like Lem, not like funny Lem but serious Lem.
Robots + rabbits = robbits!
Why argue when you can test it? If metcalfe's sure, why don't he start an ISP that charges rate of um, $.10/hour, or something like that? If he's more profitable than flat rate competition, everybody will eventually switch to that system. Frankly, I think flat rate is a bit of a gimmick: it assumes that most people won't take advantage of what it proudly proclaims: as many internet time as you want. The idea is just that even people who use it for 3 hour a month get a bit nervous (hey, what if I do want alot of time one month.. this gives me upper limit of what i'll pay in any case). So, psychologically, if not logically, flat rate is better. But then again, doesn't AOL have $5/month/5hour plan? I do think it's kind of biased, I mean, alot of idlers on irc spend 6-8 hours online every day and they pay $22 for aol and down to $10/month for some other isps, while use.. about 50-60 times more dialup time than users of that aol plan. Well, whatever. As I said, the guy can easily go and start a new isp, he's got :-)
the money. If he's successful all of us internet junkies will be sorry
I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong, although I think you are, but what's important here is that you should be consistent in your views. Fine, you don't like the idea that company hires cheaper coder from india - that's your right. But, stop buying *anything* made outside, because if you do, you are doing the same thing you are blaming congress for. Also, if your point of view prevails, we should also stop all exports - never sell another thing outside, because by doing it we're talking food from foreign workers kid's mouth - and that wouldn't be fair if we forbid them to do the same thing to us. So, how much do you pay for gas for your car? Expect to pay much more, perhaps 50 times more when we stop buying it from overseas. And so on. In general,
Uh, there's like a zillion of these. WindowMaker (I use it), blackbox, icewm are the most popular, then there's fvwm, twm, aewm, and tons more. I use WM because it's about 1/5 mem usage of XF86_SVGA and I think it looks better than Enlightenment and UI is better than that of both GNOME and KDE. Yeah, I know you could use it with them, but that adds bloat and that awkward panel.. But on a slower box i'd probably use blackbox, I heard it's one of the lightest window managers.
Slaves? Uh, no. Look that word up in a dictionary. :-).
Slave is a person who belongs to another person,
any order originated from his master must be
carried out or he'll be lashed. These immigrants
are *employees*. They can quit any fucking time.
Sure, they're confined by the situation with INS/
visa but slavery is quite different. If you were
a real slave in, let's say, 50BC in Rome you would
learn to appreciate the difference
What they are 'worth'? Sorry to disappoint you,
but you are hardly worth $10. 80% of you is water
, some salts, etc. Oh you mean as a *programmer*?
Ever heard of supply/demand? You don't have any
inherent 'worth', you worth as much as companies
are willing to pay you, nothing less, nothing more.
Wake up. Sorry to bring you down.
Huh? Illegal immigrants living on welfare? To
quote simpsons, that's unpossible. Welfare is
only given *legal* immigrants, and not all of
them at that.
Oh, but you can load images in lynx. Here's the /etc/lynx.cfg file:
example from
SUFFIX:.jpg:image/jpeg
SUFFIX:.jpeg:image/jpeg
VIEWER:image/jpeg:display %s&:XWINDOWS
display is a viewer that comes with imagemagick.. there's an alternative - xli and zgv - for console. If there's no link for an image, you should hit '*' which reloads page with links for all inline images. Then, you just click on a link and the image will download and display. On a 28.8, this is the best way - i don't *want* to see 99% of images on webpages.
Anyone else thinks nethack is much more interesting? (I can't stand games where you have to click frantically every few seconds.)
What if there's a certain technological advance
that every civilization is bound to make, that
effectively wipes it out? For example, a chain
reaction that creates a Nova? Also, it is impos-
sible to predict. Think about it: the way we
find out about the world is, by most part, experi-
mentation. It's quite plausible that one of these
experiments is bound to be performed by *any*
technological civilization. Like splitting the
atom. Which reminds me, when there was a first underwater nuclear test, some scientists feared that it might set off a chain reaction where all of the oceans undergo nuclear reaction (with all the catastrophic consequences). Something like that may still be ahead of us. And, I suppose, it should be fairly close, cause if it wasn't, other civilizations would have time to expand to other planets/solar systems and therefore would be warned about that experiment, which apparently hasn't happened.
First, a disclaimer: I hate f***** Microsoft. Now,
what he probably meant was that, given the FoF by
Jackson, which MS officially doesn't agree with,
this suit was to be expected, and officially they
probably are certain of winning it because they're
certain they will win the first one on appeal.
Of course, this is all official and might be bull,
but what he *said* does not in any way imply any-
thing bad.
Heh. Your assumption here is that indo-european
language conventions will survive longer than
digital encoding conventions. I see no reason to
think so. If we found a slab of rock with charac-
ters written 50k years ago, with no relation to
any modern language, we'd never decode it. How do
you think egyptian language was decoded? They found
a slab where message was written in both greek and
egyptian (written when one of Alexander the Macedonian's heirs was a pharaoh there). Before that, nobody was even close. That's even though whole damn egypt is covered in engravings, and language is still alive (I think). And, that's something like 2500(?) years since it was widely used there to engrave. If they want them to easily learn the language, they have to leave drawings, alot of them. Every word in the dictionary with a visual illustration. Engraved on stainless steel. These guys are probably hoping that either conventions of encoding will survive (which is a bit silly, if they do, why not full archive of the internet?), or that posterity will be much smarter than us.
There's something inherently pathetic about school projects.. They'll tell you to write a calculator, so that you can look at it and say "how much lamer it is than what already is out there, and it took me a few months.." I much prefer the idea of making something that was not done - even if it's impossible to do at this time. It's all in the process, man. Shock them. Say, I want a complete AI, that can talk for 10 minutes without anyone detecting it's a bot. One advantage here is that there will be no students who do the assignment in 15 minutes and then get bored or play quack or IRC.
To make a comletely NL CLI, one would have to create a complete AI first. I hope I don't need to tell you that task is a bit over Microsoft's head. On the other hand, they don't have to make it complete. For instance, a person might type c:>go to my documets folder. And command interpreter should be able to understand it. If they took, let's say, 300 or 400 most common commands people might use, that would be a great help for newbies. It may also say something like "next time when you need to do this, you might want to try shorter command: cd c:\My Documents. Of course, MS being what it is, they will mess it all up somehow, but this is a very interesting direction nevertheless. With all the newbies pouring into Linux, we might want to do the same. As you see, it won't be all that hard to make a list of most common commands people might want to do and try to parse them.
Why not have an html page called 'sorting order' and linked to every page in your project that needs this info?