OK, you always see the server uptimes, but for people who actually do day to day work on a machine's console, how much uptime do you have? My average uptime on my Linux box at home is probably 3 days, because I am always fiddling with the hardware or software. I've only had a handful of crashes, though. One was because of a JAZ drive that I have never gotten to work with a cheap SCSI card I bought, and the others were because of something I broke in X, i.e., I fiddled with the hostname and X would lock up the system, or I changed some configuration file and hosed things up. I sometimes wonder how much uptime I would have if I just left well enough alone. But that wouldn't be any fun, would it?
because DVDs are going to go away just like betamax
I don't think that likely, but if the cost of freedom were the death of DVD, I, for one consider that to be a paltry sum. Something better will come along.
Don't forget, one of the manned moon missions left a mirror up there, on the light side.
You mean the near side. They put the mirrors on the moon so we can bounce lasers off them and do neato things. My pet peeve is when people say light side and dark side, since the moon's entire surface gets light, but we only see one side due to tidal locking. There; I feel better.
That was the same thing that I noticed. I find that none of the ensemble comedy shows are much good, but MadTV has had more bright moments than SNL recently.
I mean, who would hire this guy to do anything? Who would want to patronize his business? What if he changes his philosophy in the future, something which tends to happen to most people during the course of their lives? I suppose this future establishes the tenuousness of the link between academic excellence and wisdom.
I can break/etc/inetd.conf on a whole new platform. Too bad it doesn't run X. I could have a whole bunch of stuff to tinker about with ignorantly and totally disable in a few minutes. I'm waaaay too stupid to trust with code.
On my Windows box, whenever given a choice, I always opt for Windows Media over Real. Why? Because the current RealPlayer clients are bloated, clunky, unstable, and slow.
Just the opposite for me. I find the sound quality for RealAudio to be noticably better than Windows Media. I agree that Real is much more bloated, though.
While I would not put it that way, I must say that I don't see the nobility in refusing profit made from your work. I don't see what moral principle is being upheld here.
Believe it or not, I think these two Brazil stories (banning of certain shoot-em-ups, and pro-free-software laws) are symptoms of the same problem. Both are a result of governments that are all-too-willing to mess with peoples lives and the processes of free markets* in order to create outcomes that they believe will be `best'. Sure, it's all fine and dandy when they do these things to help free software, but do we really want a government that decides what companies succeed and what companies fail on a whim?
Actually I have a different take on this. I think that by mandating free software, they are doing exactly the correct thing. When they buy proprietary packages, they lock themselves into a single company due to compatability issues. By standardizing on MS-Office, for example, they make it very difficult to change over to another package down the line. Users don't want to convert files, and conversions are never as good as the original files, and sometimes lose important elements. By using free software, even if you decide to go with another alternative in future, the fact that source code is open and can be incorporated in future products from whatever vendor you choose promises to make changes much more simple. And if they are missing functionality, they can hire developers to improve the product, a difficult, if not outright impossible task in the closed source world. Consider the educational possibilities: computer science students in Brazil working on government sponsored open source projects during the school year and on internships. The government could award prizes to the students and their CS departments based upon performance. The money they save on proprietary software and license policing could probably fund the program. I think this sort of move is long overdue for governments. I would never trust my company/government to run software which I had no hand whatsoever in the production of and no legal recourse if the vendor changes licensing agreements. In short, I think it very responsible that governments limit themselves wherever possible, to software that they own, rather than that which the license. That notwithstanding, go for the most flexible license you can get.
Several hundred thousand years is a long way removed from 65 million years. I'm not so sure we could get a dinosaur even if aliens and frozen eggs right before the extinction. Still, the technology is promising. Maybe one day, wombs will obsolete altogether.
Re:Marketing apricot seeds as a cancer cure.
on
Suing the Spammers
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· Score: 1
Looks like two wins here; not only did they stop a spammer, they stopped a malicious spammer trying to pass apricot seeds as a cure for cancer. Anyone involved in preying on those dying of cancer does not get any of my sympathy.
I guess they figured they would get hammered if they said Laetril. Laetril is a drug derived from apricot seeds that was marketed as a cancer cure back in the 70's, IIRC. That was found to be a fraud, so, I guess they tried marketing just the seeds to people. Pathetic.
What evidence do you have that God does not approve of these scientists "creating" life? And just where is the arrogance? To paraphrase you, "When will lions realize that they are not the be-all end-all species and finally limit their voracious appetite for meat?" Man is the only species which does place it's actions in check. Do goats limit their intake when they are about to strip an area of all its foliage?
I have had this sort of discussion with people before, and have encountered the "playing God" argument many times. What I always ask is what is the evidence that they have that we are playing God? Does their religion have a commandment saying that cloning or combining naturally occuring materials (like DNA) is sinful? What about grafting an orange tree to create a hybrid? In short, why do you draw the line where you draw it? I have no issue with religious convictions. What I find all too often, however, is people making decisions not based upon what their relgion actually says, but rather upon their opinions of what their religion should say.
I don't know of anything in any major religion which prohibits this sort of thing. Please, someone, enlighten me if I am incorrect. There are some moral issues and practical issues. These are principally issues of risk v. benefit, and in the case of cloning, the likelyhood of bringing humans in the world with fatal genetic flaws, which would likely happen in the early trials, I would think. That does not forbid cloning in and of itself, IMHO.
In fact, to go a bit further, what evidence do you have that we are not in fact, the end-all be-all species?
I seem to recall a documentary which said that American paper money is engraved in such a way to cause distortion when copied. I don't recall all my optics, but couldn't one cause destructive interference of light by manipulating how closely together lines are on the bill?
I think finding life would pose some obstacles if the objective is to one day terraform Mars. There would be great debate on the propriety of disturbing a planet with an ecosystem already going, even if it is primitive. The colonists would be some brave souls, breathing and eating alien microorganisms and experiencing the long term effects, if any. I read Larry Niven's The Legacy of Heorot and the prospect of eating alien animals is disquieting, at least to me. I think I would go vegetarian. The though of parasites would keep me up nights. Good pair of books, BTW (the book had a sequel).
It's a simple question, but a good one - has XF86 figured out an API set for direct video access? We're still lumbering about with unix domain sockets and tcp/ip - it's been brought up *alot* lately that performance could be dramatically improved if we were to create a standard X API set to do direct hw access.
Why was this moderated down as flamebait. Seems reasonable to me.
MHO a failure is the best thing that can happen for the space program.
I love the idea of the space program, but NASA should be in the courtroom next to MS for being charged with having a monopoly and -especially- hindering "innovations". After making such a careless mistake as last time, and now this, I predict private space programs will really see a boost in popularity and hopefully funding.
What sort of space program would we see with only private funding? These things don't tend to pay off in forms of profit. The only people I could see doing it would be monopolies, which almost always come about because of government interference. If we only go to space with private endeavors, the only things we'll see for a while are communications satellites and tours for the wealthy. Most of the science which fascinate me so don't have an obvious application for profit in the near future, and as such are generally done by universities, which benefit greatly from government funding. How many countries don't have government space agencies, and how many of those countries have a space program worthy of admiration?
Sounds like it's time to remind the spies who runs this outfit.
Hopefully the spies won't show us who runs the outfit. I don't know if government paranoia can be overcome sufficiently to truly hold the NSA accountable.
I think Larry Niven may have it right on the matter of time travel. If time travel which allows one to actually change the past were actually possible, inevitably, enough tinkering would occur that somebody would go back and do something which would prevent the invention of the time machine. Like prevent the species that created it, etc. So time travel probably does not exist, because any species which would invent it evenentually erases itself from history.
Ahhh! Excellent, that means I can put that big 'No Blacks Allowed' Sign back outside of my resteraunt! If they want to eat freely they should do so in a medium they control, right?
Actually, this is pretty precisely the Libertarian argument, with the addendum that market forces will tend to discourage such overt displays of racism. I think the notion of it being the government which is instigating the discrimination is the the problem.
You forgot all the reboots. Including the reboot when you installed the video driver and the reboot after you configured the video and the reboot after you installed the NIC driver and the reboot after you configured the bindings and the TCP/IP properties and the reboot after you sneezed on the keyboard and the reboot after the OS felt like it.
I think you forgot a step. You should re-install the Service Pack after all that. Preferably SP4 or 5 at that . . .
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OK, you always see the server uptimes, but for people who actually do day to day work on a machine's console, how much uptime do you have? My average uptime on my Linux box at home is probably 3 days, because I am always fiddling with the hardware or software. I've only had a handful of crashes, though. One was because of a JAZ drive that I have never gotten to work with a cheap SCSI card I bought, and the others were because of something I broke in X, i.e., I fiddled with the hostname and X would lock up the system, or I changed some configuration file and hosed things up. I sometimes wonder how much uptime I would have if I just left well enough alone. But that wouldn't be any fun, would it?
because DVDs are going to go away just like betamax
I don't think that likely, but if the cost of freedom were the death of DVD, I, for one consider that to be a paltry sum. Something better will come along.
Anybody who falls for this bunk richly deserves it. Hopefully, they will learn a valuable lesson.
I wish they allowed you to download an ISO image for CD burning. Sadly, that does not seem to be available for the beta.
I thnk the best thing about color palms coming out is that, hopefully, they will make the B&W version cheaper. Maybe then I can afford one.
Don't forget, one of the manned moon missions left a mirror up there, on the light side.
You mean the near side. They put the mirrors on the moon so we can bounce lasers off them and do neato things. My pet peeve is when people say light side and dark side, since the moon's entire surface gets light, but we only see one side due to tidal locking. There; I feel better.
That was the same thing that I noticed. I find that none of the ensemble comedy shows are much good, but MadTV has had more bright moments than SNL recently.
Well, now someone with the TIVO remote control has to create a configuration file for the Linux Infrared Remote Control program.
Hmm, I wonder could you hack an HP 48SX calculator with that. I still have one from my skool daze.I mean, who would hire this guy to do anything? Who would want to patronize his business? What if he changes his philosophy in the future, something which tends to happen to most people during the course of their lives? I suppose this future establishes the tenuousness of the link between academic excellence and wisdom.
I can break /etc/inetd.conf on a whole new platform. Too bad it doesn't run X. I could have a whole bunch of stuff to tinker about with ignorantly and totally disable in a few minutes. I'm waaaay too stupid to trust with code.
On my Windows box, whenever given a choice, I always opt for Windows Media over Real. Why? Because the current RealPlayer clients are bloated, clunky, unstable, and slow.
Just the opposite for me. I find the sound quality for RealAudio to be noticably better than Windows Media. I agree that Real is much more bloated, though.Wow, what a schmuck!
While I would not put it that way, I must say that I don't see the nobility in refusing profit made from your work. I don't see what moral principle is being upheld here.
Believe it or not, I think these two Brazil stories (banning of certain shoot-em-ups, and pro-free-software laws) are symptoms of the same problem. Both are a result of governments that are all-too-willing to mess with peoples lives and the processes of free markets* in order to create outcomes that they believe will be `best'. Sure, it's all fine and dandy when they do these things to help free software, but do we really want a government that decides what companies succeed and what companies fail on a whim?
Actually I have a different take on this. I think that by mandating free software, they are doing exactly the correct thing. When they buy proprietary packages, they lock themselves into a single company due to compatability issues. By standardizing on MS-Office, for example, they make it very difficult to change over to another package down the line. Users don't want to convert files, and conversions are never as good as the original files, and sometimes lose important elements. By using free software, even if you decide to go with another alternative in future, the fact that source code is open and can be incorporated in future products from whatever vendor you choose promises to make changes much more simple. And if they are missing functionality, they can hire developers to improve the product, a difficult, if not outright impossible task in the closed source world. Consider the educational possibilities: computer science students in Brazil working on government sponsored open source projects during the school year and on internships. The government could award prizes to the students and their CS departments based upon performance. The money they save on proprietary software and license policing could probably fund the program. I think this sort of move is long overdue for governments. I would never trust my company/government to run software which I had no hand whatsoever in the production of and no legal recourse if the vendor changes licensing agreements. In short, I think it very responsible that governments limit themselves wherever possible, to software that they own, rather than that which the license. That notwithstanding, go for the most flexible license you can get.Several hundred thousand years is a long way removed from 65 million years. I'm not so sure we could get a dinosaur even if aliens and frozen eggs right before the extinction. Still, the technology is promising. Maybe one day, wombs will obsolete altogether.
Looks like two wins here; not only did they stop a spammer, they stopped a malicious spammer trying to pass apricot seeds as a cure for cancer. Anyone involved in preying on those dying of cancer does not get any of my sympathy.
I guess they figured they would get hammered if they said Laetril. Laetril is a drug derived from apricot seeds that was marketed as a cancer cure back in the 70's, IIRC. That was found to be a fraud, so, I guess they tried marketing just the seeds to people. Pathetic.And how does the performance compare?
I have had this sort of discussion with people before, and have encountered the "playing God" argument many times. What I always ask is what is the evidence that they have that we are playing God? Does their religion have a commandment saying that cloning or combining naturally occuring materials (like DNA) is sinful? What about grafting an orange tree to create a hybrid? In short, why do you draw the line where you draw it? I have no issue with religious convictions. What I find all too often, however, is people making decisions not based upon what their relgion actually says, but rather upon their opinions of what their religion should say.
I don't know of anything in any major religion which prohibits this sort of thing. Please, someone, enlighten me if I am incorrect. There are some moral issues and practical issues. These are principally issues of risk v. benefit, and in the case of cloning, the likelyhood of bringing humans in the world with fatal genetic flaws, which would likely happen in the early trials, I would think. That does not forbid cloning in and of itself, IMHO.
In fact, to go a bit further, what evidence do you have that we are not in fact, the end-all be-all species?
I seem to recall a documentary which said that American paper money is engraved in such a way to cause distortion when copied. I don't recall all my optics, but couldn't one cause destructive interference of light by manipulating how closely together lines are on the bill?
I think finding life would pose some obstacles if the objective is to one day terraform Mars. There would be great debate on the propriety of disturbing a planet with an ecosystem already going, even if it is primitive. The colonists would be some brave souls, breathing and eating alien microorganisms and experiencing the long term effects, if any. I read Larry Niven's The Legacy of Heorot and the prospect of eating alien animals is disquieting, at least to me. I think I would go vegetarian. The though of parasites would keep me up nights. Good pair of books, BTW (the book had a sequel).
Why was this moderated down as flamebait. Seems reasonable to me.
I love the idea of the space program, but NASA should be in the courtroom next to MS for being charged with having a monopoly and -especially- hindering "innovations". After making such a careless mistake as last time, and now this, I predict private space programs will really see a boost in popularity and hopefully funding.
What sort of space program would we see with only private funding? These things don't tend to pay off in forms of profit. The only people I could see doing it would be monopolies, which almost always come about because of government interference. If we only go to space with private endeavors, the only things we'll see for a while are communications satellites and tours for the wealthy. Most of the science which fascinate me so don't have an obvious application for profit in the near future, and as such are generally done by universities, which benefit greatly from government funding. How many countries don't have government space agencies, and how many of those countries have a space program worthy of admiration?
Hopefully the spies won't show us who runs the outfit. I don't know if government paranoia can be overcome sufficiently to truly hold the NSA accountable.
I think Larry Niven may have it right on the matter of time travel. If time travel which allows one to actually change the past were actually possible, inevitably, enough tinkering would occur that somebody would go back and do something which would prevent the invention of the time machine. Like prevent the species that created it, etc. So time travel probably does not exist, because any species which would invent it evenentually erases itself from history.
Actually, this is pretty precisely the Libertarian argument, with the addendum that market forces will tend to discourage such overt displays of racism. I think the notion of it being the government which is instigating the discrimination is the the problem.
Install NT.
Finish hardware setup, except for video.
Install SP3.
Install IE5.
Install Option Pack 4
Install video drivers.
Re-install Option Pack 4.
You forgot all the reboots. Including the reboot when you installed the video driver and the reboot after you configured the video and the reboot after you installed the NIC driver and the reboot after you configured the bindings and the TCP/IP properties and the reboot after you sneezed on the keyboard and the reboot after the OS felt like it.
I think you forgot a step. You should re-install the Service Pack after all that. Preferably SP4 or 5 at that . . .