Except...Hasbro had nothing to do with the development of Scrabble. Neither did Selchow & Richter, who owned the assets before they were bought by Hasbro.
That's irrelevant. I didn't build my house. Neither did the family I bought it from. Nor did the people they bought it from. But we transferred the rightful ownership of such through various transactions.
Same with Scrabble. Capitalism would fall apart if all of a sudden we could say "ahhhh, you weren't the original owner/creator/inventor/builder of that, give up your ownership now!" Why would anyone bother to acquire rights of a property such as Scrabble, knowing they were worthless. They wouldn't. Those rights were bought for what both parties agreed was a fair price at the time, and there's no reason to invalidate that ongoing ownership today. Each of the companies involved speculated on the value of scrabble, up until Hasbro today, and is rightfully benefiting from it.
Believe it or not a lot of research and planning and testing went into the design of the original game, for good tile distributions, playability, etc.. It's not just "crosswords." Try designing one yourself with a board, tiles, points, and a dictionary from scratch, and see how playable it is.
There is some magic to the combination they came up with, and I think they have every right to protect their rights to it. People have come up with variations that have different scoring positions, tile values, distributions, and so on, and guess what; they're not that popular.
They created over 60 years ago, and are still selling it for $15 for the basic,
It's still a deal at $15. The board is better quality than most new cheesy games, and the pieces are still wooden and engraved with the letters.
I've bought a couple of them; one for the house, one for the cottage, and find they're an incredible deal.
I also bought the versions for Palm and Pocket PC. My only beef with the PPC version is that it doesn't show your score as you build a word (and rearranging the tiles can be awkward). But overall, I love them all, and play them all.
I personally found Scrabulous kind of awkward, and the new Scrabble looks and plays better, IMHO. Chat, dictionary, history, and they're adding keyboard input and ability to turn off animations. (Scrabble turns take a minute or two anyway, what's the outrage with a 3 second animation at the end, sheeesh.)
It looks better. Some people have complained about the animations; they don't take that much time, and Hasbro has announced they're going to implement a switch to turn them off, as well as keyboard (based upon user feedback). Hasbro owns the rights to the game, implemented their own version, and are enforcing the rights.
I don't know why everyone has so much hate on for the new version. It looks better, they're fixing up the couple of things people have complained about.
Most importantly, with Scrabulous you had to refresh your page manually, or set up a 2-minute auto refresh. Not great for games with any interactivity. The official Scrabble doesn't need this refresh, it tells you when someone has moved, instantly, which really is a make-or-break feature in my book.
Yes, some games are one-turn-per-day, and each works fine for that. But when you want a play-the-game-now interactively with someone, Scrabulous was a joke.
I don't see it as a big loss, in my opinion. The new one works fine, and should be even better when it's out of beta.
If Coca-Cola accidentally created 100 million cans of faulty Coke, you know for sure the entire 100 million cans would be dropped in the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, without a second thought and irrespective of what that did to the year's profits.
In my opinion, Jobs' value to the company is pretty damn hard to measure... But like most risks in corporations, it's up to the management of the company to manage such risks. If there is a risk of Jobs' health removing him from the role, they should have appropriate key man insurance, and a plan, to mitigate that risk as much as possible.
While the value of Apple's corporate executives is seen (rightly or wrongly) as highly centralized around Jobs, many other companies have policies to mitigate risk between their management. When I ran a major photo sharing in the.COM bubble days, two of the top two folks at Kodak came to court us (well, at least pump us for information, it turned out.) They had to take separate Lear Jets to our city; they weren't allowed to fly on the same plane, in case of an incident. Many companies have similar policies that so many board members or senior management can't fly on the same plane.
I can understand investors' concern about Jobs. However, he doesn't seem that bad to me, and I'm sure top dollars are being put into every health concern he may have. I do have mixed feelings about the disclosure issue. In the case of most companies, where the perceived management talent is spread among several folks, the illness or death of one has less of an impact as compared to Apple, where the perceived management direction comes from one man.
And given how the company floundered without him, and regained its direction with his return, there might just be something to that. Perhaps because of this, Apple does owe some more details of Jobs personal status to its investors. As an investor, I would personally have a lot less confidence in Apple without Steve's strong vision at the helm.
What keeps me with Skype is that I can have US telephone number. So no matter where I am my friends and family can call me.
If there was another service which allowed me to have a US telephone number for incoming calls and let me call any other POTS number I'd use it.
Ummmm, one of of any number of several hundred VOIP providers (or Vonage) with a PC softphone, give you exactly that. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's possible to get free DID's (phone numbers) in major cities. Even here in Canada, LES.NET gives you local VOIP numbers for $8.88/mo (unlimited incoming) and 1.5c/minute North American outgoing. It's a very generic (and open) way to do things. Skype is a just one proprietarized VOIP solution, that happens to be a bit easier to set up.
I think a really good example is this guy's plane, he made it to be as light as possible and had to make his own motor for it. I think they should make one the size of this 'dragonfly' but with a propeller like the plane in the video.
What a radical design! They should make passenger planes with this style.:) I guess the Wright Bros. were onto something.
It sure seems a lot more stable, controllable, and elegant that the dragonfly. (Granted, it was larger, which adds stability, but it wasn't *that* much bigger.) The dragonfly seemed out of control most of the flight, nearly hitting floors, walls, ceilings, and the photographer.
The one you linked to seemed to have a STOL (short-takeoff-and-landing) style to it, allowing slow, controlled flight.
I'm not sure there's a whole business in it, but I like the idea.
Most land-line telco subscribers get their voicemail through their telco. And most telco's have a voicemail access number that also always to to *leave* voicemail. (In fact, the voicemail access almost seems to be a hacked-on mis-use of the voicemail leaving system. You have to hit # or * to get to your voicemail first, making the leaving voicemail feature seem high priority.)
Anyhow, whenever I was snagged into doing a mass calling thingy for a group I belonged to, I would simply call the voicemail access number and leave messages about the event or whatever that we were supposed to call about. I didn't have to bother people during their supper, and they could check the info at their leisure. I often wished this feature were more universally available.
This company seems to be onto something, although I wish it also did it for land lines...
"it's where I put my phone, wallet, diary, car keys and sunglasses"
I think the word you're looking for here isn't "brief case," it's "purse."
Being an avid photographer, and having founded a photo sharing site in the.COM bubble days, I always carried my camera with me in a nice compact camera bag. As good digital cameras got smaller and smaller, they took up less and less room in the bag, which ended up getting populated with other useful stuff (money, keys, phone, receipts, USB drives, etc.)
Eventually, with the company dying the.COM death, and my cell phone's camera being half decent for casual snaps, I ended up leaving the camera behind. I still called it my "camera bag", but one day someone pointed out the lack of camera, and the presence of the other items. More and more I'm challenged by people on it. And occasionally I find myself "rummaging" around in it looking for something like a little old lady. I slowly evolved into effectively carrying a purse. Sigh...
("It's a european carry-all!", as Seinfield might say...
I didn't quite forget my pants, but one morning at 6:00am I got a frantic cell call from the girlfriend: "my car slipped on ice, and I went into the water and I can't get the door open!!!":S I dashed out the door and drove quickly to help. She was all right, laughing at the side of the road with a neighbor; a branch was blocking the door, but it was low tide so there wasn't actually any water around her (thankfully), and she made it out another door.
Anyhow, being half-way to work, I continued in, not realizing I had pyjama tops on until I got there; oh well, I worked the day in my pj tops... I took about a year for the teasing about that day to taper off...
Okay, it's not *that* great a story, but still 10x more interesting than TFA:)
I've forgotten my lappie more than once (or worse, the power cord, d'oh!); in either case, I always have enough data/code/docs stored centrally, that I always have enough to work on. I don't think it ever warranted a drive back home. (And the one time it was semi-essential, the laptop was still on, so I just accessed it through my firewall.)
Well, as romance-novelesque as it sounds, it is actually the first couple of minutes of "The Shawkshank Redemption" (as the parent poster clearly pointed out.) Hardly a piece of fluff fiction, but a great movie (#2 on IMDB all time, #1 in my books) about the triumph of perseverance and the human spirit. (Based on a short story by Stephen King, like many a good movie...)
(The fight with the wife/lover bit was quite secondary to the main story, about being wrongfully imprisoned and slowly but surely overcoming it.)
It's one of the very few movies I watch a few times a year. Hans Reiser is hardly a noble character as in Shawshank. I'm not terribly thrilled about him getting out in 15 for simply revealing where he left her corpse...
If I were the family, I think I'd prefer him serving the extra ten years, rather than the arbitrary "closure" of knowing where her decaying remains are. I hope/wonder if the prosecutors and the courts consulted them before agreeing to this. (Some people would indeed value burying their loved ones' remains over having the culprit serve his full sentence, and I guess one should respect that. Not me, though, Hans should serve his full time...)
- Tax dodge--giving money to a charity reduces his personal income taxes. By giving it to a charity he controls, he gets additional benefits. - As PR for Microsoft against the anti-trust investigation.
I think you're missing one. I believe I read that one of the things the foundation does, is provide (i.e. BUY) copies of Windows (now Vista, presumably) for schools, poor countries, etc.. Cranks up MS revenues (and his stock value), gets a tax break, indoctrinates students and developing countries to MS products, and such. I'm sure the overall formula looks great for Bill and friends. I'd love to be believe that Bill was honestly altruistic, but given his harmful, aggressive, anti-competitive behaviour in the past, I'm not terribly inclined to believe it.
I personally believe that any charity should be banned on spending a single dime on any products of the company from which the charitable foundation spawned. Otherwise it's just a tax dodge and conflict of interest...
I agree with involving the media. While I do agree about the courtesy of contacting the police chief first, for sure, once he is unable or unwilling or too confused to help, definitely go to the media. As much as I have a distaste for sensational media, they are useful for embarrassing organizations into action.
I bought a Linksys wireless security camera, didn't like the quality, returned it, but I forgot to remove the auto-email upon motion detection. D'oh! (I could have sworn I did a factory reset, but apparently I messed up. One day six months later, I started getting random video clips emailed to me from some family's living room:S Thankfully, all innocent daily stuff.
I got the IP address, contacted their ISP (Eastlink) repeatedly, to try and get them to notify their customer what was going on. After several months of banging my head against the wall, and then finally warning them I was going to the media, I finally did just that. I called CTV, they were out within an hour, did a story on the spot. The morning after it aired, the emails had stopped. No one from Eastlink ever contacted me about this issue, period.
(Staples, on the other hand, where I had bought the camera, did try to act responsibly; they contacted me when the story aired, profusely apologized, figured out who bought it and contacted them, and indicated they had put new corporate procedures in place to ensure that it wouldn't happen again. Seems about as responsible as one can get. I hadn't even thought that they would be able to track the return/sale so easily, but I guess they're on the ball; the ISP seemed to me to be the more natural route to trace this email bombardment.)
So again, as much as I generally loath the sensationalism of the media, and have a disdain for local human interest news ("and here's a story that's gone to the dogs! heh heh heh!"), the visibility is incredibly useful for getting the attention of organizations...
I want my browser, when finished loading a half dozen pages, and sitting idle (except for a few animate GIF's), to not be using 50% of my CPU time. All browsers seem guilty of it these days. I thought it was Flash for awhile, but flashblock only helps slightly. And when a stop and restart of the browser (reloading all the same pages of the prior session) takes 0% CPU, while the former session took, 50%, it really seems like something is wrong.
Is it runaway Javascript? What is going on? I just want a low-memory-footprint, low-cpu-usage browser, and I can't seem to find one these days...
Gilette razor blades are more expensive than the razor; HP Ink costs more than the printer. These after market items are money makers for companies. There are cheaper alternatives in all cases. I doubt Apple makes much money off of these accessories, and they're probably more of a hassle to provide than they're worth, so they charge a premium.
I used to get oil changes at a dealership, and it was a serious rip off. More often than finding something under warrantee, they'd find something that would cost me more money, and push me to trade in my car for another one. I got sick of that, and went for the cheap lube and changing it myself. If you want the dealer to scan over your car for something that might need warrantee work, I'm sure any dealer would be willing to do that for free, no need to get gouged on oil changes. (Some dealers do give you oil changes free or cheap when under warrantee, so they can find additional manufacturer-paid repairs to do; fair enough.)
Brakes are another major rip-off, in my opinion. I used to pay $500 regularly to get my brakes done. I now do it myself. Most people are terrified of them, due to Hollywood's history of showing frequent brake failures and the spectacular crashes that result. If you don't mind getting your hands dirty, it's the cost of a couple of pads ($20-$40), and removing four bolts (after removing the tire). And checking the bits and pieces are lubricated properly, etc.. If your rotors are worn, too, a new OEM pair isn't that expensive (I paid $100 for a pair recently). Brake shops will charge you that for grinding your rotors, and several times that for new ones. (I would never consider getting rotors turned/ground again; new ones are just too inexpensive.) How hard is it to replace a rotor? When you have the caliper off to change the pads, you simply pull off the old rotor, and push on the new one; not even any bolts. (It's held on by the wheel's lug nuts). You should obviously read up and learn how to do it properly, but honestly, it's not that hard; a Haynes manual will explain things well. Rear drum brakes have a lot more parts and springs and things, and can be more intimidating, but once you know how they work and go together, they're not bad at all, either. A point for any novices: make sure everything is cleaned and lubricated well with the proper high temperature grease.
One other point (back on the computer topic): some people have talked about the superior service of Apple. Not all Apple certified dealers are the same. Mine sat on my Mac for a couple of weeks before starting the repair, by which time the warrantee was over! Talking to Apple directly, who were helpful, and told the dealer to fix the damn thing (they had to do it twice, first time he claimed there was no order in the system for it). And when it came back, the keyboard fit so poorly in the case, I wondered if he "sat on it" literally... And the front LED didn't work. I brought it back in, waited another couple of weeks, and finally got my unit back in working condition. I'd never take it to that dealer again, and the next nearest dealer is 500km away. Looks like another item I'll be repairing myself from now on, now that it's out of warrantee.
Well, the next move would simply be some tool, or modification to bittorrent, that makes the traffic patterns look like that of other protocols. While I'm sure it would have some impact upon performance, surely torrent packets can be make to look pretty damn similar to a bunch of HTTPS images being loaded on a web page (or something along those lines). Just like DRM, each move like this isn't solving any problem, just slowing things down, while a counter-move is made. (Or, another provider is chosen who doesn't throttle traffic, competition permitting.)
Also, the poster indicated he had already heard of screen. An "apt-get install screen" and "man screen" would have answered his question pretty quickly.
(On the other hand, I'm such a big fan of screen, having the word spread on it a bit more is for the common good, I guess...)
I agree, "screen" is the absolute best answer. I've been using it since the early days, and it's only gotten better (split screens, etc.)
My question: I'd like to be able to list the files in a directory. I've been using "echo *", but it's formatting is a little rough. I've also heard of "ls", but I'm unfamiliar with it. Have other Slashdot users encountered this situation?
(Seriously, though, this seems like a pretty light question to warrant a slashdot article. *Any* semi-experienced Unix admin should be intimately familiar with "screen." I wouldn't hire one that wasn't. A google of "terminal unix reconnect" finds it as the first result. Not bashing the original poster, but I'm surprised/. editors approved this. Wait a minute, I must be new here...)
The article doesn't mention how these earth-originated asteroids become space-borne, except a brief mention of the "Late Heavy Bombardment." I would think that pieces of earth that are sent into space by other asteroids hitting earth, would be subject to *far* more stress, heat, and general voilence in being struck hard enough to reach escape velocity, than they would on a simple re-entry.
Surely the impact event and associated energy required to eject the matter from Earth's stronger gravity and much thicker atmosphere, would be far worse when compared to the landing on the moon, no? (I know it's not a direct comparison, but consider how much fuel the Apollo missions in the massive boosters used to get out of Earth's gravity, versus how little they used to decelerate down to the moon's surface, carried on board the relatively small lander.)
EnumProcess didn't exist (well, it likely did, but wasn't documented) at that time... (In fact, I probably *was* using it, in raw INT form, that I reverse engineered from MS's PS.EXE use of it.)
A lot of MS API's that they use themselves are *eventually* documented, but that lag time gives them a competitive advantage on the app-building side.
Can someone comment upon how water seems to go from ice, sublimating directly to a gas on Mars, and the implications for potential life? Due to the low atmospheric pressure on Mars, H2O goes from ice to gas directly, just as carbon dioxide goes from solid (dry ice) to gas by direct sublimation on Earth, without any liquid phase...
While some hardy variations of life could possibly life within ice, or somehow benefit from water vapour, it seems that most life on earth thrived and differentiated in the liquid phase of water, which seems to be (currently, at least) non-existent on mars. (And most stories I have read about extremophiles surviving within ice cores and so on, seem to indicate they're kind of in limbo while frozen, not reproducing and thriving...)
So you're suggesting no-one except Microsoft was able to write fully functional Windows applications ?
Yes, I would agree with his sentiment. When Win2K was gaining popularity, I worked for a company that provided a suite of consistent system maintenance tools for a number of platforms. It was my job to do the Win2K implementation. One of our products needed to list all processes (ps-like). There was no API to do it. But MS programs could do so. I had to reverse engineer some processor interrupt that their PS command was doing, to see how it got a list of running processes.
That was one small example. I experienced about a dozen similar situations. There are undoubtedly hundreds, if not thousands, of similar problems for developers of larger Windows applications.
(Microsoft Exchange Server is another interesting case I came across in a recent company I started. It's completely designed around being able to get mail *into* it in every way possible; but to extract or read email out of it, in any sane standard format, is damn near impossible; or at least a herculean effort, where it should be trivial.)
For anyone who is down in the trenches, Microsoft API's just reek of anticompetitive behaviour, start to finish... And when they get their hands slapped, they come up with the minimal required documentation, for a massive fee. Governments just seem to roll over left and right for MS; I guess they know the right folks to pay off...
Maybe they're testing to see how price-sensitive people are to their Vista hatred.
When people demand XP instead of Vista, are people just whining with the growing pains of the new OS, or are they damn serious about not putting up with Vista's crap (I would guess the latter). They're in a position of customers wanting a discontinued OS, which is pretty awkward for them.
If people are willing to go for Vista for a $50 savings, then they can't be that upset about Vista, and are just whining. If they are really willing to put their money where their mouths are, it's a pretty strong message about the Vista concerns.
More importantly, a clear preference for the $50 XP option, would help Dell send a strong message to Microsoft not to discontinue distribution and support for XP.
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Except...Hasbro had nothing to do with the development of Scrabble. Neither did Selchow & Richter, who owned the assets before they were bought by Hasbro.
That's irrelevant. I didn't build my house. Neither did the family I bought it from. Nor did the people they bought it from. But we transferred the rightful ownership of such through various transactions.
Same with Scrabble. Capitalism would fall apart if all of a sudden we could say "ahhhh, you weren't the original owner/creator/inventor/builder of that, give up your ownership now!" Why would anyone bother to acquire rights of a property such as Scrabble, knowing they were worthless. They wouldn't. Those rights were bought for what both parties agreed was a fair price at the time, and there's no reason to invalidate that ongoing ownership today. Each of the companies involved speculated on the value of scrabble, up until Hasbro today, and is rightfully benefiting from it.
Believe it or not a lot of research and planning and testing went into the design of the original game, for good tile distributions, playability, etc.. It's not just "crosswords." Try designing one yourself with a board, tiles, points, and a dictionary from scratch, and see how playable it is.
There is some magic to the combination they came up with, and I think they have every right to protect their rights to it. People have come up with variations that have different scoring positions, tile values, distributions, and so on, and guess what; they're not that popular.
It's still a deal at $15. The board is better quality than most new cheesy games, and the pieces are still wooden and engraved with the letters.
I've bought a couple of them; one for the house, one for the cottage, and find they're an incredible deal.
I also bought the versions for Palm and Pocket PC. My only beef with the PPC version is that it doesn't show your score as you build a word (and rearranging the tiles can be awkward). But overall, I love them all, and play them all.
I personally found Scrabulous kind of awkward, and the new Scrabble looks and plays better, IMHO. Chat, dictionary, history, and they're adding keyboard input and ability to turn off animations. (Scrabble turns take a minute or two anyway, what's the outrage with a 3 second animation at the end, sheeesh.)
It looks better. Some people have complained about the animations; they don't take that much time, and Hasbro has announced they're going to implement a switch to turn them off, as well as keyboard (based upon user feedback). Hasbro owns the rights to the game, implemented their own version, and are enforcing the rights.
I don't know why everyone has so much hate on for the new version. It looks better, they're fixing up the couple of things people have complained about.
Most importantly, with Scrabulous you had to refresh your page manually, or set up a 2-minute auto refresh. Not great for games with any interactivity. The official Scrabble doesn't need this refresh, it tells you when someone has moved, instantly, which really is a make-or-break feature in my book.
Yes, some games are one-turn-per-day, and each works fine for that. But when you want a play-the-game-now interactively with someone, Scrabulous was a joke.
I don't see it as a big loss, in my opinion. The new one works fine, and should be even better when it's out of beta.
If Coca-Cola accidentally created 100 million cans of faulty Coke, you know for sure the entire 100 million cans would be dropped in the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, without a second thought and irrespective of what that did to the year's profits.
Case in point with Mazda.
In my opinion, Jobs' value to the company is pretty damn hard to measure... But like most risks in corporations, it's up to the management of the company to manage such risks. If there is a risk of Jobs' health removing him from the role, they should have appropriate key man insurance, and a plan, to mitigate that risk as much as possible.
While the value of Apple's corporate executives is seen (rightly or wrongly) as highly centralized around Jobs, many other companies have policies to mitigate risk between their management. When I ran a major photo sharing in the .COM bubble days, two of the top two folks at Kodak came to court us (well, at least pump us for information, it turned out.) They had to take separate Lear Jets to our city; they weren't allowed to fly on the same plane, in case of an incident. Many companies have similar policies that so many board members or senior management can't fly on the same plane.
I can understand investors' concern about Jobs. However, he doesn't seem that bad to me, and I'm sure top dollars are being put into every health concern he may have. I do have mixed feelings about the disclosure issue. In the case of most companies, where the perceived management talent is spread among several folks, the illness or death of one has less of an impact as compared to Apple, where the perceived management direction comes from one man.
And given how the company floundered without him, and regained its direction with his return, there might just be something to that. Perhaps because of this, Apple does owe some more details of Jobs personal status to its investors. As an investor, I would personally have a lot less confidence in Apple without Steve's strong vision at the helm.
What keeps me with Skype is that I can have US telephone number. So no matter where I am my friends and family can call me.
If there was another service which allowed me to have a US telephone number for incoming calls and let me call any other POTS number I'd use it.
Ummmm, one of of any number of several hundred VOIP providers (or Vonage) with a PC softphone, give you exactly that. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's possible to get free DID's (phone numbers) in major cities. Even here in Canada, LES.NET gives you local VOIP numbers for $8.88/mo (unlimited incoming) and 1.5c/minute North American outgoing. It's a very generic (and open) way to do things. Skype is a just one proprietarized VOIP solution, that happens to be a bit easier to set up.
I think a really good example is this guy's plane, he made it to be as light as possible and had to make his own motor for it. I think they should make one the size of this 'dragonfly' but with a propeller like the plane in the video.
What a radical design! They should make passenger planes with this style. :) I guess the Wright Bros. were onto something.
It sure seems a lot more stable, controllable, and elegant that the dragonfly. (Granted, it was larger, which adds stability, but it wasn't *that* much bigger.) The dragonfly seemed out of control most of the flight, nearly hitting floors, walls, ceilings, and the photographer.
The one you linked to seemed to have a STOL (short-takeoff-and-landing) style to it, allowing slow, controlled flight.
I'm not sure there's a whole business in it, but I like the idea.
Most land-line telco subscribers get their voicemail through their telco. And most telco's have a voicemail access number that also always to to *leave* voicemail. (In fact, the voicemail access almost seems to be a hacked-on mis-use of the voicemail leaving system. You have to hit # or * to get to your voicemail first, making the leaving voicemail feature seem high priority.)
Anyhow, whenever I was snagged into doing a mass calling thingy for a group I belonged to, I would simply call the voicemail access number and leave messages about the event or whatever that we were supposed to call about. I didn't have to bother people during their supper, and they could check the info at their leisure. I often wished this feature were more universally available.
This company seems to be onto something, although I wish it also did it for land lines...
Being an avid photographer, and having founded a photo sharing site in the .COM bubble days, I always carried my camera with me in a nice compact camera bag. As good digital cameras got smaller and smaller, they took up less and less room in the bag, which ended up getting populated with other useful stuff (money, keys, phone, receipts, USB drives, etc.)
Eventually, with the company dying the .COM death, and my cell phone's camera being half decent for casual snaps, I ended up leaving the camera behind. I still called it my "camera bag", but one day someone pointed out the lack of camera, and the presence of the other items. More and more I'm challenged by people on it. And occasionally I find myself "rummaging" around in it looking for something like a little old lady. I slowly evolved into effectively carrying a purse. Sigh...
("It's a european carry-all!", as Seinfield might say...
Don't you mean "blasting across the Alkalai flats on a jet-powered, monekey-navigated, ..."
I didn't quite forget my pants, but one morning at 6:00am I got a frantic cell call from the girlfriend: "my car slipped on ice, and I went into the water and I can't get the door open!!!" :S I dashed out the door and drove quickly to help. She was all right, laughing at the side of the road with a neighbor; a branch was blocking the door, but it was low tide so there wasn't actually any water around her (thankfully), and she made it out another door.
Anyhow, being half-way to work, I continued in, not realizing I had pyjama tops on until I got there; oh well, I worked the day in my pj tops... I took about a year for the teasing about that day to taper off...
Okay, it's not *that* great a story, but still 10x more interesting than TFA :)
I've forgotten my lappie more than once (or worse, the power cord, d'oh!); in either case, I always have enough data/code/docs stored centrally, that I always have enough to work on. I don't think it ever warranted a drive back home. (And the one time it was semi-essential, the laptop was still on, so I just accessed it through my firewall.)
Well, as romance-novelesque as it sounds, it is actually the first couple of minutes of "The Shawkshank Redemption" (as the parent poster clearly pointed out.) Hardly a piece of fluff fiction, but a great movie (#2 on IMDB all time, #1 in my books) about the triumph of perseverance and the human spirit. (Based on a short story by Stephen King, like many a good movie...)
(The fight with the wife/lover bit was quite secondary to the main story, about being wrongfully imprisoned and slowly but surely overcoming it.)
It's one of the very few movies I watch a few times a year. Hans Reiser is hardly a noble character as in Shawshank. I'm not terribly thrilled about him getting out in 15 for simply revealing where he left her corpse...
If I were the family, I think I'd prefer him serving the extra ten years, rather than the arbitrary "closure" of knowing where her decaying remains are. I hope/wonder if the prosecutors and the courts consulted them before agreeing to this. (Some people would indeed value burying their loved ones' remains over having the culprit serve his full sentence, and I guess one should respect that. Not me, though, Hans should serve his full time...)
I think you're missing one. I believe I read that one of the things the foundation does, is provide (i.e. BUY) copies of Windows (now Vista, presumably) for schools, poor countries, etc.. Cranks up MS revenues (and his stock value), gets a tax break, indoctrinates students and developing countries to MS products, and such. I'm sure the overall formula looks great for Bill and friends. I'd love to be believe that Bill was honestly altruistic, but given his harmful, aggressive, anti-competitive behaviour in the past, I'm not terribly inclined to believe it.
I personally believe that any charity should be banned on spending a single dime on any products of the company from which the charitable foundation spawned. Otherwise it's just a tax dodge and conflict of interest...
I agree with involving the media. While I do agree about the courtesy of contacting the police chief first, for sure, once he is unable or unwilling or too confused to help, definitely go to the media. As much as I have a distaste for sensational media, they are useful for embarrassing organizations into action.
I bought a Linksys wireless security camera, didn't like the quality, returned it, but I forgot to remove the auto-email upon motion detection. D'oh! (I could have sworn I did a factory reset, but apparently I messed up. One day six months later, I started getting random video clips emailed to me from some family's living room :S Thankfully, all innocent daily stuff.
I got the IP address, contacted their ISP (Eastlink) repeatedly, to try and get them to notify their customer what was going on. After several months of banging my head against the wall, and then finally warning them I was going to the media, I finally did just that. I called CTV, they were out within an hour, did a story on the spot. The morning after it aired, the emails had stopped. No one from Eastlink ever contacted me about this issue, period.
(Staples, on the other hand, where I had bought the camera, did try to act responsibly; they contacted me when the story aired, profusely apologized, figured out who bought it and contacted them, and indicated they had put new corporate procedures in place to ensure that it wouldn't happen again. Seems about as responsible as one can get. I hadn't even thought that they would be able to track the return/sale so easily, but I guess they're on the ball; the ISP seemed to me to be the more natural route to trace this email bombardment.)
So again, as much as I generally loath the sensationalism of the media, and have a disdain for local human interest news ("and here's a story that's gone to the dogs! heh heh heh!"), the visibility is incredibly useful for getting the attention of organizations...
I want my browser, when finished loading a half dozen pages, and sitting idle (except for a few animate GIF's), to not be using 50% of my CPU time. All browsers seem guilty of it these days. I thought it was Flash for awhile, but flashblock only helps slightly. And when a stop and restart of the browser (reloading all the same pages of the prior session) takes 0% CPU, while the former session took, 50%, it really seems like something is wrong.
Is it runaway Javascript? What is going on? I just want a low-memory-footprint, low-cpu-usage browser, and I can't seem to find one these days...
As many have mentioned, this is no news...
Gilette razor blades are more expensive than the razor; HP Ink costs more than the printer. These after market items are money makers for companies. There are cheaper alternatives in all cases. I doubt Apple makes much money off of these accessories, and they're probably more of a hassle to provide than they're worth, so they charge a premium.
I used to get oil changes at a dealership, and it was a serious rip off. More often than finding something under warrantee, they'd find something that would cost me more money, and push me to trade in my car for another one. I got sick of that, and went for the cheap lube and changing it myself. If you want the dealer to scan over your car for something that might need warrantee work, I'm sure any dealer would be willing to do that for free, no need to get gouged on oil changes. (Some dealers do give you oil changes free or cheap when under warrantee, so they can find additional manufacturer-paid repairs to do; fair enough.)
Brakes are another major rip-off, in my opinion. I used to pay $500 regularly to get my brakes done. I now do it myself. Most people are terrified of them, due to Hollywood's history of showing frequent brake failures and the spectacular crashes that result. If you don't mind getting your hands dirty, it's the cost of a couple of pads ($20-$40), and removing four bolts (after removing the tire). And checking the bits and pieces are lubricated properly, etc.. If your rotors are worn, too, a new OEM pair isn't that expensive (I paid $100 for a pair recently). Brake shops will charge you that for grinding your rotors, and several times that for new ones. (I would never consider getting rotors turned/ground again; new ones are just too inexpensive.) How hard is it to replace a rotor? When you have the caliper off to change the pads, you simply pull off the old rotor, and push on the new one; not even any bolts. (It's held on by the wheel's lug nuts). You should obviously read up and learn how to do it properly, but honestly, it's not that hard; a Haynes manual will explain things well. Rear drum brakes have a lot more parts and springs and things, and can be more intimidating, but once you know how they work and go together, they're not bad at all, either. A point for any novices: make sure everything is cleaned and lubricated well with the proper high temperature grease.
One other point (back on the computer topic): some people have talked about the superior service of Apple. Not all Apple certified dealers are the same. Mine sat on my Mac for a couple of weeks before starting the repair, by which time the warrantee was over! Talking to Apple directly, who were helpful, and told the dealer to fix the damn thing (they had to do it twice, first time he claimed there was no order in the system for it). And when it came back, the keyboard fit so poorly in the case, I wondered if he "sat on it" literally... And the front LED didn't work. I brought it back in, waited another couple of weeks, and finally got my unit back in working condition. I'd never take it to that dealer again, and the next nearest dealer is 500km away. Looks like another item I'll be repairing myself from now on, now that it's out of warrantee.
Well, the next move would simply be some tool, or modification to bittorrent, that makes the traffic patterns look like that of other protocols. While I'm sure it would have some impact upon performance, surely torrent packets can be make to look pretty damn similar to a bunch of HTTPS images being loaded on a web page (or something along those lines). Just like DRM, each move like this isn't solving any problem, just slowing things down, while a counter-move is made. (Or, another provider is chosen who doesn't throttle traffic, competition permitting.)
Also, the poster indicated he had already heard of screen. An "apt-get install screen" and "man screen" would have answered his question pretty quickly.
(On the other hand, I'm such a big fan of screen, having the word spread on it a bit more is for the common good, I guess...)
I agree, "screen" is the absolute best answer. I've been using it since the early days, and it's only gotten better (split screens, etc.)
My question: I'd like to be able to list the files in a directory. I've been using "echo *", but it's formatting is a little rough. I've also heard of "ls", but I'm unfamiliar with it. Have other Slashdot users encountered this situation?
(Seriously, though, this seems like a pretty light question to warrant a slashdot article. *Any* semi-experienced Unix admin should be intimately familiar with "screen." I wouldn't hire one that wasn't. A google of "terminal unix reconnect" finds it as the first result. Not bashing the original poster, but I'm surprised /. editors approved this. Wait a minute, I must be new here...)
The article doesn't mention how these earth-originated asteroids become space-borne, except a brief mention of the "Late Heavy Bombardment." I would think that pieces of earth that are sent into space by other asteroids hitting earth, would be subject to *far* more stress, heat, and general voilence in being struck hard enough to reach escape velocity, than they would on a simple re-entry.
Surely the impact event and associated energy required to eject the matter from Earth's stronger gravity and much thicker atmosphere, would be far worse when compared to the landing on the moon, no? (I know it's not a direct comparison, but consider how much fuel the Apollo missions in the massive boosters used to get out of Earth's gravity, versus how little they used to decelerate down to the moon's surface, carried on board the relatively small lander.)
EnumProcess didn't exist (well, it likely did, but wasn't documented) at that time... (In fact, I probably *was* using it, in raw INT form, that I reverse engineered from MS's PS.EXE use of it.)
A lot of MS API's that they use themselves are *eventually* documented, but that lag time gives them a competitive advantage on the app-building side.
Can someone comment upon how water seems to go from ice, sublimating directly to a gas on Mars, and the implications for potential life? Due to the low atmospheric pressure on Mars, H2O goes from ice to gas directly, just as carbon dioxide goes from solid (dry ice) to gas by direct sublimation on Earth, without any liquid phase...
While some hardy variations of life could possibly life within ice, or somehow benefit from water vapour, it seems that most life on earth thrived and differentiated in the liquid phase of water, which seems to be (currently, at least) non-existent on mars. (And most stories I have read about extremophiles surviving within ice cores and so on, seem to indicate they're kind of in limbo while frozen, not reproducing and thriving...)
Anyone?
Yes, I would agree with his sentiment. When Win2K was gaining popularity, I worked for a company that provided a suite of consistent system maintenance tools for a number of platforms. It was my job to do the Win2K implementation. One of our products needed to list all processes (ps-like). There was no API to do it. But MS programs could do so. I had to reverse engineer some processor interrupt that their PS command was doing, to see how it got a list of running processes.
That was one small example. I experienced about a dozen similar situations. There are undoubtedly hundreds, if not thousands, of similar problems for developers of larger Windows applications.
(Microsoft Exchange Server is another interesting case I came across in a recent company I started. It's completely designed around being able to get mail *into* it in every way possible; but to extract or read email out of it, in any sane standard format, is damn near impossible; or at least a herculean effort, where it should be trivial.)
For anyone who is down in the trenches, Microsoft API's just reek of anticompetitive behaviour, start to finish... And when they get their hands slapped, they come up with the minimal required documentation, for a massive fee. Governments just seem to roll over left and right for MS; I guess they know the right folks to pay off...
Maybe they're testing to see how price-sensitive people are to their Vista hatred.
When people demand XP instead of Vista, are people just whining with the growing pains of the new OS, or are they damn serious about not putting up with Vista's crap (I would guess the latter). They're in a position of customers wanting a discontinued OS, which is pretty awkward for them.
If people are willing to go for Vista for a $50 savings, then they can't be that upset about Vista, and are just whining. If they are really willing to put their money where their mouths are, it's a pretty strong message about the Vista concerns.
More importantly, a clear preference for the $50 XP option, would help Dell send a strong message to Microsoft not to discontinue distribution and support for XP.