Frosty Hardison, a parent of seven who also said that he believes the Earth is 14,000 years old.
I rememeber another Dude named Frosty that even had problems with seasonal warming. (Although he did predict a future Christ-like resurrection as he died, if memory serves.)
Seriously, you can't make up names like that. A guy whose name starts with "Frosty Hard" taking a strong stance on global warming? You're almost waiting or the punbch line.
(Reminds me of a lawyer in this province who was big into advocating women's righs, and often represented oppressed women; her name was Sookie Beavers. I might have the spelling wrong. Again, you can't make this stuff up. I believe her name was related to her Native heritage. Unfortunately, I found her comedic appropriateness of her name, distracted from the rather serious issues she dealt with.)
Personally, I refuse to spend that much on something I know will somehow eventually end up in the washing machine and dryer, twice!
Exactly! And don't forget the toilet. My old Kyocera was in the washer twice and toilet twice (clean water, post excitement, thankfully). A careful cleaning got it back into action. Not so much success when my Razr hit the salt water (nasty, nasty stuff). Rendered it useless. At that point, I resolved only to carry a bottom-of-the-line Palm and a free-with-plan cell phone with me. Until they make these things properly waterproof and drop proof, I'm not carrying $500+ in my pocket.
On a related note, have you ever noticed a little white strip on your cell phone, typically under the battery? I always wondered what they were for, until my Kyocera hit the water. Upon hitting water, these things turn bright red. It really elminiates the "oh, it must have gotten splashed by the rain" argument, when attempting to get service. It does go to show that there must be a lot of service calls due to water submersion. Why can't they make a cheap water resistant phone, just like they've done with watches for years.
>I can just see one of the first shot for HD DVD porn's title being....
1080pee
Reminds me of a Nova Scotia license plate I once saw; it was a conservation sponsored vanity plate kinda thing, with images of the endangered Piping Plover on it. The person had PLOVER as the vanity letters. I wonder if they ever realized what some people might read that as... "Why you kinky bastard..."
I remember Desmond Morris, on The Human Animal, reporting on very similar studies (amount of skin shown, versus ovulation), quite a number of years ago.
A lot of these labels, sadly enough, probably come from a response of the customer service (and legal) departments. As ridiculous as it sounds, there are a lot of dumbasses out there that will try these things, and end up bitching to the customer service/legal departments of the companies. Many of these are no doubt due to addressing trends of problems with products, and not just arbitrary and tangential paranoia by legal departments. (After the fiftieth dude blew off his eyebrows from checking the fuel level in his jet ski, they decided to throw on the label, kinda thing; it probably *was* one of the greater mis-uses of the product.)
In my opinion the only place where Windows is really far ahead of Mac OS X is.NET. Or more specifically: C# 2.0. C# is simply the nicest programming language and.NET the most consistent and easiest API that I've ever used.
No offense, but you need to get out more and try other API's. C# is a very elegant language (pretty much Java, but where they extended it, they did it very well indeed). And it probably *is* the nicest interface to the *Windows* API, if you have to use the Windows API. However, the Windows suite of API's, is big. Really, really big, as Adams would say.
There are other API's that achieve the same thing, without a fraction of the complexity of the Windows API. Gates et al have purposefully kept the API huge and constantly expanding (just like the universe!) to keep anyone from creating a compatible non-Windows implementation of it.
Modality, and special keys
on
The Birth of vi
·
· Score: 3, Informative
One thing Joy didn't mention, but I think is probably safe to imply, and one of the reasons that vi is still my favorite editor: because of its modes, you don't have to rely upon special keys (arrows, function keys, etc.), because the navigation is done with the standard alphanumeric keys (which the typewriter keyboard was designed for, not for taking the hands off the home position to reach for arrow keys and such).
One can edit in VI very efficiently without moving the keys from the home position, and doing unnatural stretches for odd keys.
The difficulty of desktop Linux is really a myth these days. I recently set up Fedora Core 6 on a laptop. Setting up FC6 as a desktop is now trivially easy. It roughly consisted of inserting a CD-ROM, booting it, clicking OK and Next a few times then feeding it disks until it finished.
And then you want to get your sound working on your newer laptop? Well, go find the brand new beta development source code for your driver and compile that up (oh yeah, install the compiler and dev kits first). Do I want ALSA or that other sound system, can't remember its name? Which one should I choose? Then configure conf.modules (or is it modules.conf?) to load the driver automtaically upon startup.
Okay, where do I set the wireless password? I know I saw that somewhere before. Oh, the Dlink-chip-du-jour isn't supported out of the box, I have to go find some more development drivers for it, if I can.
Hmmmm, how do I suspend this and hibernate it properly? I know that was trivial under windows. Can I even do that under Linux?
Hmmm, where did my scrolling regions go on my trackpad? You know, the edges that let me scroll easily under Windows. I have to do *what* to get that working?
Now, time for a presentation; install openoffice, that works fine, good. Okay, now to switch to external monitor. Hmmm, Fn-Monitor doesn't work. Time to google. WTF? I have to edit xorg.conf to enable the external monitor, and then hack mode lines to get it working for my projector? (Reaches for Windows XP CD...)
I love Linux, and *I* personally will suffer those problems; but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else who isn't an expert (and even wouldn't for some of those), as I'd end up with a lifetime of this type of support on my hands.
Starbucks learned to quickly and publicly address P.R. issues (duh), after this 9/11 embarassment where they screwed up, and didn't address it promptly, creating a P.R. nightmare.
(BTW: I agree with the poster's comments about NYPD blue; it looked like an interesting show, but it's just stupid how shakey it is, I can't watch it.)
It *is* possible to get a documentary feel without all the head-snapping virtual-whiplash that seems to be used. Saving Private Ryan was incredibly realistic in a "you are there" sense. Even the awesome comedy mocumentaries, Trailer Park Boys and Spinal Tap achieve documentary feel without making one sick. It's *not* that hard to feel like a hand-held camera. Shakey cam on BG and NYPD blue, etc., don't feel like a hand held camera, they feel like an expensive gimballed camera whipping its virtual head on cue, over and over, in a predictable and annoying fashion. (Someone said something over there, oh, great, another sloppy pan... In some ways, it's almost like forced Pan and Scan, which is known for butchering movies.)
One idea for the makers of this DVD: use the "multiple angles" feature, or even apply the shakey cam in *post production*, preserving a non-shakey version (included as a different angle, or more simply, as a B-side), so the rest of us can appreciate your work for what it is, not how much caffeine your camera operator had.
As they note in the article, this is a refinement on Inductive Charging. I used to love my inductively charged toothbrush; place it on it's stand (just a smooth white bump), and it charged, no physical electrical contact required.
Does anyone know why they need to actively sense the location of the object, and route the energy specifically to it? Inductive energy isn't "consumed" unless there's a draw on it. For example, a common example of induction is in a wall-wart transformer; one set of windings goes between the 120v from your wall, which is inductively coupled to an (ummmm, larger, I think) winding on your 12v side; as long as there's no load on the 12v side, there won't be a draw on the 120v side (aside from losses; transformers aren't perfectly efficient, which is why a wall transformer might be slightly warm, even when not being used).
Is it the inefficiency of such losses that require active routing, or another reason?
I loved the original series, but can't watch the new stuff because of the excess use of shakey cam. We *get* it, yes, it seems more "real" with shakey cam. But it's also very annoying and overused. If I want to turn my head in a jerky fashion, I will, do it by making something else on the screen interesting; don't make the camera do it for me. I find it very patronizing, pretentious, and faddish and I wish producers would stop using it. Let the material show its strength, unobscured by a shaky camera.
Finally, a prepaid-ish card you can use as a credit card. Having my credit destroyed by a divorce, I was looking for a prepaid credit card; unfortunately, the only options seemed to be offshore banks, and upon a bit of research, they all turned out to clearly be ripoffs (taking your $100 deposit and leaving you in the lurch). (Being without a credit card was liberating in some ways, always living within your means; but for online purchases, restauraunts, etc., a credit card can be very handy.)
I love the idea of putting money on a debit card, that can be used as a credit card. Hopefully this paypal offering will offer Mastercard-like (and not paypal-like) handling of problems and concerns, and also be available in Canada.
The employee who saw his bonus deposit 20% less than promised, likely was just seeing income tax being deducted from it. Christmas bonuses are like salary, a taxable benefit. Nothing the employer can do about that. Technically, any benefit they give you (e.g. a turkey) is a taxable benefit. (When I was a reasonably high paid developer, here in Canada, I saw christmas bonuses of $5000 be whittled down to $2500 after taxes. It's fact of life, be thankful for the intent.)
A papercut? That is something that draws blood, causes annoyance, and some pain and discomfort. This judgement is more akin to a slight itch on your arm you scratch subconsciously...
I was kind of hoping that the article would deal with animals that had what we might consider geeky tendencies by nature (for example, using tools); not just animals which humans put in some arbitrary situation. Slapping a monkey in a space capsule makes it no more a geek than if you had done the same with a bunch of bananas, instead... Pavlov's dog? It exhibited a basic (errr, pavlovian) response, that is a pretty low level thing (drooling when it heard cues for food), about as far from inherent geekiness as you can get. Yes, many of us geeks might start drooling when we hear the doorbell from the pizza dude, but so do the non-geeky.
These are not geeky animals, but animals experimented upon or exploited *by* geeks.
I do know that Google Maps works better in FF than Opera. Don't get me wrong, it's quite usable and useful in Opera, but in FF it's a little more interactive with the mouse. I don't think this is due to a lack of effort on Google's part to support Opera.
It isn't. I've seen specific evidence that Google made an effort to make it work in Opera. When google maps first came out, it didn't work properly in opera (8.0, I believe it was). If you zoomed in at all, things didn't render properly, and it was unusuable. After several months, I noticed that it *did* start working (without me upgrading the browser). Google must have done some Q.A. and tweaks to make it work. Good on them, although I would hope someone like google would test with something as "good" as Opera to start with.
Seriously, I've typically been part of small development teams (last company, three people, this time, just me); it's *not* that hard to ensure Opera compatibility. Whenever you change a feature and or do general Q.A., open one more browser and test it out. I always keep a copy of IE (ugh), Firefox, and Opera open (usually the latter two under Linux as well), and when I'm mucking with style sheets or Ajax or whatever, I will reload the page in each, to ensure things work. It's not that hard. Unfortunately my lazy-assed coworker (errr, employee) didn't see fit to do the same thing, and introduced some bad alignments and such. (But at the time, that was a small subset of the problems with this person.)
In the rare case where a specific browser is doing something clearly wrong/different, I'll drop the relevant parties a note about a compatability problem (well, not MS, as that'd clearly be a waste of time). If all developers did this, compatability would be far less of an issue.
In a similar vein, it'd be nice if Opera had a "this page didn't render properly" button; I know it would be admitting a bit of a weakness, but automated reports as to sites with problems, would likely go a long way to helping opera understand its differences. (Yes, the site may be non-compliant, but if you can put aside your philosophical outrage, find a way to render it properly without mucking up your standards compliance, it'd boost your market share greatly. *Then* you have far more power to promote web standards compliance.)
Other than lower power, possibly smaller size, I see one of the biggest advantages here is the noise reduction. Hard drives, in my opinion, tend to be the noisiest part of any PC, and the reason why it's annoying having one in your living room as a media PC, or one in your bedroom (come on geeks, you know you all have one in your bedroom).
Next to the hard drive, fans tend to be the other noisy component, but there are lots of existing solutions to that problem (higher quality, larger, quieter fans, other cooling methods, etc.)
Dear God, please say it isn't true. After all the patches and service packs and driver updates, even *XP* still can't hibernate/restore properly more than 80% of the time, I find. If it's worse than XP, then MS should just give up on this tech.
While I generally agree about the wonderful reliability of the POTS system, a very simple answer is a backup cell phone. (And on my vonage account, if my voip phone is offline, it automatically rings through to my cell.) Generally, problem solved. (Doesn't fix not being able to fall back to dialup when the high speed is down due to power issues, but at least addresses it for voice. If 1x worked worth a damn, that'd be a good net fallback, too.)
In general, though, it'd be nice to see the cable/dsl companies add the same degree of batteries/fallback to their system in case of power outages, that the phone company has for voice lines. Probably not going to happen, unless regulated, though.
I've felt very strongly against this impossible-to-open and dangerous packaging for ages, and often wondered if and when consumers would revolt. It's bad enough for me, a reasonably healthy person with a Swiss Army Knife on his belt; but for the young or elderly or handicapped, this packaging is totally inappropriate.
There's so little excuse for it; there are alternatives using the same materials, where the two sides are held together by four or so "dimples" which hold the sides together. It's easy to show if the package has been opened, but you don't hurt yourself opening it.
Doesn't this sound very stupid? Sanctions targeting the leader? I see sanctions as reducing the overall number of things entering a country, not eliminating it. You don't think enough Johnny Walker or Cadillac's can be smuggled in to keep *one* ruler happy, depsite the heaviest sanctions in the world? Unless he's hung up on creating major trends in his country (and he doesn't seem to care about the well-being of his country at all), then what's the point?
Slashdot Mirror
Frosty Hardison, a parent of seven who also said that he believes the Earth is 14,000 years old.
I rememeber another Dude named Frosty that even had problems with seasonal warming. (Although he did predict a future Christ-like resurrection as he died, if memory serves.)
Seriously, you can't make up names like that. A guy whose name starts with "Frosty Hard" taking a strong stance on global warming? You're almost waiting or the punbch line.
(Reminds me of a lawyer in this province who was big into advocating women's righs, and often represented oppressed women; her name was Sookie Beavers. I might have the spelling wrong. Again, you can't make this stuff up. I believe her name was related to her Native heritage. Unfortunately, I found her comedic appropriateness of her name, distracted from the rather serious issues she dealt with.)
Exactly! And don't forget the toilet. My old Kyocera was in the washer twice and toilet twice (clean water, post excitement, thankfully). A careful cleaning got it back into action. Not so much success when my Razr hit the salt water (nasty, nasty stuff). Rendered it useless. At that point, I resolved only to carry a bottom-of-the-line Palm and a free-with-plan cell phone with me. Until they make these things properly waterproof and drop proof, I'm not carrying $500+ in my pocket.
On a related note, have you ever noticed a little white strip on your cell phone, typically under the battery? I always wondered what they were for, until my Kyocera hit the water. Upon hitting water, these things turn bright red. It really elminiates the "oh, it must have gotten splashed by the rain" argument, when attempting to get service. It does go to show that there must be a lot of service calls due to water submersion. Why can't they make a cheap water resistant phone, just like they've done with watches for years.
1080pee
Reminds me of a Nova Scotia license plate I once saw; it was a conservation sponsored vanity plate kinda thing, with images of the endangered Piping Plover on it. The person had PLOVER as the vanity letters. I wonder if they ever realized what some people might read that as... "Why you kinky bastard..."
I remember Desmond Morris, on The Human Animal, reporting on very similar studies (amount of skin shown, versus ovulation), quite a number of years ago.
A lot of these labels, sadly enough, probably come from a response of the customer service (and legal) departments. As ridiculous as it sounds, there are a lot of dumbasses out there that will try these things, and end up bitching to the customer service/legal departments of the companies. Many of these are no doubt due to addressing trends of problems with products, and not just arbitrary and tangential paranoia by legal departments. (After the fiftieth dude blew off his eyebrows from checking the fuel level in his jet ski, they decided to throw on the label, kinda thing; it probably *was* one of the greater mis-uses of the product.)
No offense, but you need to get out more and try other API's. C# is a very elegant language (pretty much Java, but where they extended it, they did it very well indeed). And it probably *is* the nicest interface to the *Windows* API, if you have to use the Windows API. However, the Windows suite of API's, is big. Really, really big, as Adams would say.
There are other API's that achieve the same thing, without a fraction of the complexity of the Windows API. Gates et al have purposefully kept the API huge and constantly expanding (just like the universe!) to keep anyone from creating a compatible non-Windows implementation of it.
One can edit in VI very efficiently without moving the keys from the home position, and doing unnatural stretches for odd keys.
And then you want to get your sound working on your newer laptop? Well, go find the brand new beta development source code for your driver and compile that up (oh yeah, install the compiler and dev kits first). Do I want ALSA or that other sound system, can't remember its name? Which one should I choose? Then configure conf.modules (or is it modules.conf?) to load the driver automtaically upon startup.
Okay, where do I set the wireless password? I know I saw that somewhere before. Oh, the Dlink-chip-du-jour isn't supported out of the box, I have to go find some more development drivers for it, if I can.
Hmmmm, how do I suspend this and hibernate it properly? I know that was trivial under windows. Can I even do that under Linux?
Hmmm, where did my scrolling regions go on my trackpad? You know, the edges that let me scroll easily under Windows. I have to do *what* to get that working?
Now, time for a presentation; install openoffice, that works fine, good. Okay, now to switch to external monitor. Hmmm, Fn-Monitor doesn't work. Time to google. WTF? I have to edit xorg.conf to enable the external monitor, and then hack mode lines to get it working for my projector? (Reaches for Windows XP CD...)
I love Linux, and *I* personally will suffer those problems; but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else who isn't an expert (and even wouldn't for some of those), as I'd end up with a lifetime of this type of support on my hands.
Starbucks learned to quickly and publicly address P.R. issues (duh), after this 9/11 embarassment where they screwed up, and didn't address it promptly, creating a P.R. nightmare.
(BTW: I agree with the poster's comments about NYPD blue; it looked like an interesting show, but it's just stupid how shakey it is, I can't watch it.)
It *is* possible to get a documentary feel without all the head-snapping virtual-whiplash that seems to be used. Saving Private Ryan was incredibly realistic in a "you are there" sense. Even the awesome comedy mocumentaries, Trailer Park Boys and Spinal Tap achieve documentary feel without making one sick. It's *not* that hard to feel like a hand-held camera. Shakey cam on BG and NYPD blue, etc., don't feel like a hand held camera, they feel like an expensive gimballed camera whipping its virtual head on cue, over and over, in a predictable and annoying fashion. (Someone said something over there, oh, great, another sloppy pan... In some ways, it's almost like forced Pan and Scan, which is known for butchering movies.)
One idea for the makers of this DVD: use the "multiple angles" feature, or even apply the shakey cam in *post production*, preserving a non-shakey version (included as a different angle, or more simply, as a B-side), so the rest of us can appreciate your work for what it is, not how much caffeine your camera operator had.
As they note in the article, this is a refinement on Inductive Charging. I used to love my inductively charged toothbrush; place it on it's stand (just a smooth white bump), and it charged, no physical electrical contact required.
Does anyone know why they need to actively sense the location of the object, and route the energy specifically to it? Inductive energy isn't "consumed" unless there's a draw on it. For example, a common example of induction is in a wall-wart transformer; one set of windings goes between the 120v from your wall, which is inductively coupled to an (ummmm, larger, I think) winding on your 12v side; as long as there's no load on the 12v side, there won't be a draw on the 120v side (aside from losses; transformers aren't perfectly efficient, which is why a wall transformer might be slightly warm, even when not being used).
Is it the inefficiency of such losses that require active routing, or another reason?
I loved the original series, but can't watch the new stuff because of the excess use of shakey cam. We *get* it, yes, it seems more "real" with shakey cam. But it's also very annoying and overused. If I want to turn my head in a jerky fashion, I will, do it by making something else on the screen interesting; don't make the camera do it for me. I find it very patronizing, pretentious, and faddish and I wish producers would stop using it. Let the material show its strength, unobscured by a shaky camera.
Finally, a prepaid-ish card you can use as a credit card. Having my credit destroyed by a divorce, I was looking for a prepaid credit card; unfortunately, the only options seemed to be offshore banks, and upon a bit of research, they all turned out to clearly be ripoffs (taking your $100 deposit and leaving you in the lurch). (Being without a credit card was liberating in some ways, always living within your means; but for online purchases, restauraunts, etc., a credit card can be very handy.)
I love the idea of putting money on a debit card, that can be used as a credit card. Hopefully this paypal offering will offer Mastercard-like (and not paypal-like) handling of problems and concerns, and also be available in Canada.
The employee who saw his bonus deposit 20% less than promised, likely was just seeing income tax being deducted from it. Christmas bonuses are like salary, a taxable benefit. Nothing the employer can do about that. Technically, any benefit they give you (e.g. a turkey) is a taxable benefit. (When I was a reasonably high paid developer, here in Canada, I saw christmas bonuses of $5000 be whittled down to $2500 after taxes. It's fact of life, be thankful for the intent.)
A papercut? That is something that draws blood, causes annoyance, and some pain and discomfort. This judgement is more akin to a slight itch on your arm you scratch subconsciously...
These are not geeky animals, but animals experimented upon or exploited *by* geeks.
It isn't. I've seen specific evidence that Google made an effort to make it work in Opera. When google maps first came out, it didn't work properly in opera (8.0, I believe it was). If you zoomed in at all, things didn't render properly, and it was unusuable. After several months, I noticed that it *did* start working (without me upgrading the browser). Google must have done some Q.A. and tweaks to make it work. Good on them, although I would hope someone like google would test with something as "good" as Opera to start with.
Seriously, I've typically been part of small development teams (last company, three people, this time, just me); it's *not* that hard to ensure Opera compatibility. Whenever you change a feature and or do general Q.A., open one more browser and test it out. I always keep a copy of IE (ugh), Firefox, and Opera open (usually the latter two under Linux as well), and when I'm mucking with style sheets or Ajax or whatever, I will reload the page in each, to ensure things work. It's not that hard. Unfortunately my lazy-assed coworker (errr, employee) didn't see fit to do the same thing, and introduced some bad alignments and such. (But at the time, that was a small subset of the problems with this person.)
In the rare case where a specific browser is doing something clearly wrong/different, I'll drop the relevant parties a note about a compatability problem (well, not MS, as that'd clearly be a waste of time). If all developers did this, compatability would be far less of an issue.
In a similar vein, it'd be nice if Opera had a "this page didn't render properly" button; I know it would be admitting a bit of a weakness, but automated reports as to sites with problems, would likely go a long way to helping opera understand its differences. (Yes, the site may be non-compliant, but if you can put aside your philosophical outrage, find a way to render it properly without mucking up your standards compliance, it'd boost your market share greatly. *Then* you have far more power to promote web standards compliance.)
Almost sounds like a case for lanthanide/actinide type of sub-map.
Other than lower power, possibly smaller size, I see one of the biggest advantages here is the noise reduction. Hard drives, in my opinion, tend to be the noisiest part of any PC, and the reason why it's annoying having one in your living room as a media PC, or one in your bedroom (come on geeks, you know you all have one in your bedroom).
Next to the hard drive, fans tend to be the other noisy component, but there are lots of existing solutions to that problem (higher quality, larger, quieter fans, other cooling methods, etc.)
Dear God, please say it isn't true. After all the patches and service packs and driver updates, even *XP* still can't hibernate/restore properly more than 80% of the time, I find. If it's worse than XP, then MS should just give up on this tech.
Where is the "+1 Incredibly Polite & Informative" when you need it...
"of adults?" You mean they're excluding all of the billionaire babies out there? Why specify "adults?"
While I generally agree about the wonderful reliability of the POTS system, a very simple answer is a backup cell phone. (And on my vonage account, if my voip phone is offline, it automatically rings through to my cell.) Generally, problem solved. (Doesn't fix not being able to fall back to dialup when the high speed is down due to power issues, but at least addresses it for voice. If 1x worked worth a damn, that'd be a good net fallback, too.)
In general, though, it'd be nice to see the cable/dsl companies add the same degree of batteries/fallback to their system in case of power outages, that the phone company has for voice lines. Probably not going to happen, unless regulated, though.
I've felt very strongly against this impossible-to-open and dangerous packaging for ages, and often wondered if and when consumers would revolt. It's bad enough for me, a reasonably healthy person with a Swiss Army Knife on his belt; but for the young or elderly or handicapped, this packaging is totally inappropriate.
There's so little excuse for it; there are alternatives using the same materials, where the two sides are held together by four or so "dimples" which hold the sides together. It's easy to show if the package has been opened, but you don't hurt yourself opening it.
Doesn't this sound very stupid? Sanctions targeting the leader? I see sanctions as reducing the overall number of things entering a country, not eliminating it. You don't think enough Johnny Walker or Cadillac's can be smuggled in to keep *one* ruler happy, depsite the heaviest sanctions in the world? Unless he's hung up on creating major trends in his country (and he doesn't seem to care about the well-being of his country at all), then what's the point?