This is why CCTV is a Good Thing. I kept getting various traffic tickets for my black BMW X5 in London, from ANPR cameras - driving in bus lanes, illegal parking (okay, that one is down to boots on ground), speed cameras and all sorts.
Eventually the police came round, and one of the first things they noticed was that CGA 78X is not in fact a black BMW X5 and is not in London - that plate is on a white Citroen CX in Glasgow. "Aha" they say, "a false number plate!" So by matching up an ANPR activation with a bit of CCTV footage they can easily tell that the car they've seen is not mine but someone else's, and *far* more interesting. I don't know what ever came of it, but I stopped hearing about the black BMW X5 pretty soon after that.
Since things like insurance companies have access to the DVLA database - stick in registration number, get make, model, colour, engine size and a bunch of other useful stuff - you'd think that whoever deals with the tickets would do the same. It's particularly interesting that the tickets I received actually had the make and model down as the BMW - someone must actually be looking at the images, or something.
The US didn't even manage to do that, though. Back then the government of the UK had the sense not to get involved in whatever half-assed brawl the US decided to start. I wish they still did.
See, that's the thing. "Set your own system up"? I don't give a toss about setting my own system up. I want to get on with things I actually enjoy. I do not enjoy watching pages and pages of text scroll past on a screen only to find the stuff I wrote yesterday no longer works because some bright spark decided that/usr/bin/python was from now on going to be provided by python-4-pre-alpha-svn-broken-on-fire because it's going to be stable in just about two years or so.
I'm not interested in all that newb "zomg I compiled my own/usr/bin/ls and now it's 2% faster!!111!!!1!1" stuff. I don't care. I want my computer to be easy to use, because fixing a broken, hard-to-use computer is Not Fun.
I am older than the median age of the slashdot readership. I have been using Linux since before most of the Arch devs were born. Linux *sucked* twenty years ago. Why are you nostalgic for those frankly tedious and frustrating days?
Right, it's small, but it's not hugely useful if you just want to whap some install media in and pull the trigger.
One of the main reasons I switched from Arch to Ubuntu was that Arch would tie its guts in a knot on a weekly basis and need wiped and reinstalled, with the corresponding dinking around trying to get everything working again.
Arch is great if you enjoy fiddling about trying to get stuff installed. If you're an experienced Linux user, it's not for you. Install Ubuntu, and get some fun stuff done instead.
I never was a massive Sonic fan, but playing it again now - on a real Megatrive, at that - I'm amazed at how smooth and fast it is. No, actually, amazed isn't the right word. I don't notice how smooth and fast it is. It's just smooth, and fast. The gameplay is so slick and transparent, with no horrible juddery slowdowns.
Jeez I wish modern games played like this. Just one more shot...
Re:small missing bit of information
on
CDE Open Sourced
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· Score: 1
It's not *much* quicker, and it's certainly a lot slower than using hardware-accelerated primitives. This is why LessTif is so slow compared to (for example) Gtk.
The other response from the AC covers it rather better than I can. Suffice it to say that if you can grow arable crops on a typical hill farm, you've got some sort of magic touch. As for me, I'm going to keep grazing animals on the rough moorland, because I've got a pretty good idea what sort of carbon footprint cultivating it for arable crops would have.
Re:small missing bit of information
on
CDE Open Sourced
·
· Score: 2
You'd have to completely rewrite it from scratch, possibly using something like Cairo, for it to work at a tolerable speed on modern hardware. CDE expects everything to be a flat unaccelerated bitplane. It's slow as hell.
If I were trying to build an Apple ][-like machine in 2012, I'd build in a Python interpreter.
Not Forth? The Python internal VM is stack-based, so getting that part working ought to be pretty easy. Actually compiling the python code into bytecode is pretty memory-intensive.
You know, I was talking about this to someone the other day. They wanted to demonstrate how TCP/IP works, but obviously everything happens so quickly all you see is a couple of lines in a wireshark window and it's done.
So as a demonstration I set up soundmodem on two machines, and set up TCP/IP using AX.25 as the link layer - 1200bps audio tones, rather like the tape tones from early 80s home computers. You can even adjust them to sound slightly different while remaining in spec to give the two computers slightly different "voices". Instead of hooking them together using radios, I just used cables, and left the PC speakers hooked up to so you could hear what they were doing. Then ping from one to the other, and "BLEEEBLORP BLEEEBLIRP" - there goes the ARP request and response, "BLEEEBLURBLURBLURP BLEEEBLIP" - there goes the ping and response, and so on.
Doing SSH over it is very, very slow to get going but tolerable once it's started.
It's probably just as fast as an equivalent system running on a modern PC, too. The big problem is that as PCs have got more powerful, more crap has been added in that no-one ever uses.
I'm prepared to bet that all bar a handful of Microsoft Word users don't do anything they couldn't have done with WordStar in CP/M.
Because I live out in the sticks, it's BT Openreach that repairs the line out to my house whenever it fails even though I'm on LLU. A significant part of the line is overhead, which isn't wonderful for ADSL, but it gets the job done at about 5Mbps and eight miles from the exchange.
I have *never* had any of the problems you've experienced, although at one point I had to persuade the engineer *not* to repair the line because the power was off anyway and I didn't think it was safe for him to work up a ladder in the 60mph winds that had damaged the cable;-)
That probably refers to the death threat he posted. Not sure about where you are, but I believe the US has laws about that too. Or is that only if you threaten the President?
Of course, this doesn't sit well with the slashdot janitor's blind hatred of the UK. I guess they hate us because we're free.
So, you pay some money to $large_company, $large_company gets $some_thing wrong in a big way, you take them to the small claims court, and you get your money back.
Probably most states are more lax, but as I understand it there are quite a few states where private citizens are pretty much not allowed to own guns at all.
By contrast, here in the UK it's easier to get a shotgun licence than a motorcycle licence, and by a strange quirk of Scottish law I'm actually breaking the law by *not* having one.
There's a bit more to it than that. I *pretty much always* have a multi-tool about my person, which has pliers, a couple of different sizes of screwdrivers and a very sharp knife, as well as the usual things for removing fishhooks and taking stones out of horses's hooves. My van always has things like crowbars, angle grinders, bolt cutters, hammers, saws and all sorts of stuff like that.
It is perfectly legal to have all of these things, in the UK.
However, if I was poking around some stranger's back garden in the dead of night with a crowbar and a set of bolt cutters, then the "going equipped" law might well apply. For similar reasons I tend not to take a multi-tool with a sharp knife if I'm going out clubbing, because there's really no reasonable purpose for having it there.
Slashdot Mirror
This is why CCTV is a Good Thing. I kept getting various traffic tickets for my black BMW X5 in London, from ANPR cameras - driving in bus lanes, illegal parking (okay, that one is down to boots on ground), speed cameras and all sorts.
Eventually the police came round, and one of the first things they noticed was that CGA 78X is not in fact a black BMW X5 and is not in London - that plate is on a white Citroen CX in Glasgow. "Aha" they say, "a false number plate!" So by matching up an ANPR activation with a bit of CCTV footage they can easily tell that the car they've seen is not mine but someone else's, and *far* more interesting. I don't know what ever came of it, but I stopped hearing about the black BMW X5 pretty soon after that.
Since things like insurance companies have access to the DVLA database - stick in registration number, get make, model, colour, engine size and a bunch of other useful stuff - you'd think that whoever deals with the tickets would do the same. It's particularly interesting that the tickets I received actually had the make and model down as the BMW - someone must actually be looking at the images, or something.
Okay, so there was a crash and an explosion?
Initial feedback points to hardware failure
D'you think?
Yeah, the US helped everyone by finally stopping supplying the Germans with oil, food and machinery. The Russians did the bulk of the work.
The US didn't even manage to do that, though.
Back then the government of the UK had the sense not to get involved in whatever half-assed brawl the US decided to start. I wish they still did.
See, that's the thing. "Set your own system up"? I don't give a toss about setting my own system up. I want to get on with things I actually enjoy. I do not enjoy watching pages and pages of text scroll past on a screen only to find the stuff I wrote yesterday no longer works because some bright spark decided that /usr/bin/python was from now on going to be provided by python-4-pre-alpha-svn-broken-on-fire because it's going to be stable in just about two years or so.
I'm not interested in all that newb "zomg I compiled my own /usr/bin/ls and now it's 2% faster!!111!!!1!1" stuff. I don't care. I want my computer to be easy to use, because fixing a broken, hard-to-use computer is Not Fun.
I am older than the median age of the slashdot readership. I have been using Linux since before most of the Arch devs were born. Linux *sucked* twenty years ago. Why are you nostalgic for those frankly tedious and frustrating days?
Right, it's small, but it's not hugely useful if you just want to whap some install media in and pull the trigger.
One of the main reasons I switched from Arch to Ubuntu was that Arch would tie its guts in a knot on a weekly basis and need wiped and reinstalled, with the corresponding dinking around trying to get everything working again.
Arch is great if you enjoy fiddling about trying to get stuff installed. If you're an experienced Linux user, it's not for you. Install Ubuntu, and get some fun stuff done instead.
Yeah, it's basically a crude blitter. It still looks pretty damn cool.
I never was a massive Sonic fan, but playing it again now - on a real Megatrive, at that - I'm amazed at how smooth and fast it is. No, actually, amazed isn't the right word. I don't notice how smooth and fast it is. It's just smooth, and fast. The gameplay is so slick and transparent, with no horrible juddery slowdowns.
Jeez I wish modern games played like this. Just one more shot...
It's not *much* quicker, and it's certainly a lot slower than using hardware-accelerated primitives. This is why LessTif is so slow compared to (for example) Gtk.
The other response from the AC covers it rather better than I can. Suffice it to say that if you can grow arable crops on a typical hill farm, you've got some sort of magic touch. As for me, I'm going to keep grazing animals on the rough moorland, because I've got a pretty good idea what sort of carbon footprint cultivating it for arable crops would have.
You'd have to completely rewrite it from scratch, possibly using something like Cairo, for it to work at a tolerable speed on modern hardware. CDE expects everything to be a flat unaccelerated bitplane. It's slow as hell.
If I were trying to build an Apple ][-like machine in 2012, I'd build in a Python interpreter.
Not Forth? The Python internal VM is stack-based, so getting that part working ought to be pretty easy. Actually compiling the python code into bytecode is pretty memory-intensive.
That's unlikely to happen before vegetables hit similar prices.
We do not have enough arable land for everyone to be a vegetarian. Not all the world's farmland is rolling midwest cornfields.
You know, I was talking about this to someone the other day. They wanted to demonstrate how TCP/IP works, but obviously everything happens so quickly all you see is a couple of lines in a wireshark window and it's done.
So as a demonstration I set up soundmodem on two machines, and set up TCP/IP using AX.25 as the link layer - 1200bps audio tones, rather like the tape tones from early 80s home computers. You can even adjust them to sound slightly different while remaining in spec to give the two computers slightly different "voices". Instead of hooking them together using radios, I just used cables, and left the PC speakers hooked up to so you could hear what they were doing. Then ping from one to the other, and "BLEEEBLORP BLEEEBLIRP" - there goes the ARP request and response, "BLEEEBLURBLURBLURP BLEEEBLIP" - there goes the ping and response, and so on.
Doing SSH over it is very, very slow to get going but tolerable once it's started.
It's probably just as fast as an equivalent system running on a modern PC, too. The big problem is that as PCs have got more powerful, more crap has been added in that no-one ever uses.
I'm prepared to bet that all bar a handful of Microsoft Word users don't do anything they couldn't have done with WordStar in CP/M.
Because I live out in the sticks, it's BT Openreach that repairs the line out to my house whenever it fails even though I'm on LLU. A significant part of the line is overhead, which isn't wonderful for ADSL, but it gets the job done at about 5Mbps and eight miles from the exchange.
I have *never* had any of the problems you've experienced, although at one point I had to persuade the engineer *not* to repair the line because the power was off anyway and I didn't think it was safe for him to work up a ladder in the 60mph winds that had damaged the cable ;-)
That probably refers to the death threat he posted. Not sure about where you are, but I believe the US has laws about that too. Or is that only if you threaten the President?
Of course, this doesn't sit well with the slashdot janitor's blind hatred of the UK. I guess they hate us because we're free.
So, you pay some money to $large_company, $large_company gets $some_thing wrong in a big way, you take them to the small claims court, and you get your money back.
Where's the downside?
Probably most states are more lax, but as I understand it there are quite a few states where private citizens are pretty much not allowed to own guns at all.
By contrast, here in the UK it's easier to get a shotgun licence than a motorcycle licence, and by a strange quirk of Scottish law I'm actually breaking the law by *not* having one.
Depending on where you are in the UK, the public have guns too - in fact, the gun laws in the UK are looser than many US states.
This is not necessarily a particularly good thing, but at least most people who live in cities are just plain not allowed to own them.
again, habitual carry is not an accepted excuse.
From personal experience, I can confirm that it is.
No, you don't have to "prove your innocence". It's a bit of a non-issue, really.
In the US, the polce all have guns and are allowed to shoot you. Note to self: don't go to the US.
There's a bit more to it than that. I *pretty much always* have a multi-tool about my person, which has pliers, a couple of different sizes of screwdrivers and a very sharp knife, as well as the usual things for removing fishhooks and taking stones out of horses's hooves. My van always has things like crowbars, angle grinders, bolt cutters, hammers, saws and all sorts of stuff like that.
It is perfectly legal to have all of these things, in the UK.
However, if I was poking around some stranger's back garden in the dead of night with a crowbar and a set of bolt cutters, then the "going equipped" law might well apply. For similar reasons I tend not to take a multi-tool with a sharp knife if I'm going out clubbing, because there's really no reasonable purpose for having it there.
In the UK, they're certainly violating the Computer Misuse Act.
Spoken like someone who has never tried to plumb a house before.
Do you understand the plumbing codes for the area you live in? *All* of them?