This technology is great, but for the love of god, please let me be able to turn it off when I want to! If I want to give the car some extra gas through a corner and kick the back end out, don't interfere with me.
For sure! There's no faster way to turn a corner (often as an emergency maneouver) than to stomp on the gas of a rear-wheel-drive car and let the back end swing out. When you've got the car in the direction you want, you release the gas. There's nothing to it.
For an excellent demonstration of rear-wheel-drive handling capabilities with a skilled driver, check out the parking lot scene less than 20 minutes into the Blues Brothers, where 4,000lb 1974 to 1978 Dodge Monaco police cars are fishtailing through tight corners between rows of parked cars.
Safety is a great goal, but I want to tell the car what to do - I don't want the car telling me what I can do. There are times when traction control gets completely in the way of non-spirited driving, too (like going up a snow-covered driveway).
More importantly, the computer has insufficient knowledge. It doesn't see the guy who just pulled out of his driveway without looking and is directly in your way, so it doesn't understand that you intend to use basic driving techniques to break the back end free and swing the car onto the lawn.
We had one of the first betamax videos when they came out.
I still have one! Free to a good home - want it? (Warning: you pay shipping.) E-mail me, slant6mopar@yahoo.com. If I could find my digital camera (damned miniturization makes things get lost easily!), I'd put photos online. It's a 1975 Sony top-loader with mechanical tuners, and *only supports Beta I* (effectively, SP only - no LP or EP speeds). If there's interest, I'll actually pull it out of the closet and copy down the model number. FOB Ottawa, Canada.
We had it for a couple of months... during the world cup in Mexico my father sat up until 2am programming the thing to record every game. Then a few weeks later some ****ers broke into the house and stole the thing, along with all my father's world cup tapes.
Heheh... can you imagine the back injuries? Until the end of Betamax, they were always heavy machines, with a good strong steel chassis. Lovely pieces of work, far more reminiscent of their broadcast quality 3/4" U-Matic brothers than the pedestrian VHS crap.
By that time VHS was taking over, and since we didn't know anyone who'd had a VHS stolen, we replaced those lovely DAT-like betamax tapes for the horror, the horror, of chewed VHS tape.
Yah. VHS uses what's called an "M-load" design, while Betamax, 3/4" and all professional formats use a U-load design. While VHS had that Rube Goldberg bicycle-chain-pulls-the-threaders design, everything else had a threading ring which simply rotated and threaded the tape - a lot simpler and less dependent on mechanical tolerances than the multilinks of the VHS threader.
Both machines can chew tape, but even new (and "improved") VHS machines are still criminally reprehensible in the face of Betamax.
Tape rules, bring back the audio cassette (only this time clean yer heads and don't use anything bigger than a C60).
Cassettes are crap. Stick with OGG/MP3 for portable use and FLAC for anything serious!
On the other hand, it's a hell of a lot of fun to fire up my Ferrograph, and watch the tape fly by at 15IPS every now and then. Yeah, there's something really deliciously tactile about the analog formats, especially with a good quality machine - the snaps of solenoids, the hum of threading motors, the whirr of the capstan motor.
Having worked as a maintenance and production technician at a TV station during the dying days of Quad, I miss most the "WWWOOOOoooowwww..." of the brakes stopping a full 6lb reel of tape at the end of a rewind cycle. I still have a few scars on my hands from trying to change a tape before the reel stopped, with the director screaming "We're live! We're live!" in my ClearCom.
This is careening waaay off topic, but there are many who yearn for their long-lost foreskin, and despite "restoration" procedures, it'll never be the same as "factory equipment." As someone who was cut at birth, I'll never truly know. Maybe it's kinda like baptism... maybe it's better to let them figure out as an adult what choice they want to make before an irreversable choice is made for them?
Don't worry, the only thing you've missed out on is infections and other trouble. If - for some reason unbeknownst to me - you want a foreskin, I wish I could have given you mine and had all the benefits of being circumcised at birth in your stead.
Speaking of attracting undesireables, I appear to have picked up a stalker, nyahahah! Eh any ACs or GuloGulo (959533) that respond to this message, everyone remember the name, this one is truly half baked.
Hah! Stalkers? Gimme a break. Try carrying around my sig and see how many disgusting uncircumcised Europeans or "I was robbed at birth!" wackos hit me up.
Ouch. And, for me, I am thankful that it occured early.
Wisdom teeth hurt far more. A broken bone hurts far more. Circumcision hurts, but if you'd had it done as an adult, you'd have been a proponent within the first year.
You must have a fever or something... Wanting to move to a country like that.
What? Of the most friendly people I've ever met (certainly more outgoing than Canadians), with a second-to-none can-do spirit?
Americans are just like Canadians, but on an individual basis they're friendlier, and the hardware stores have more/better tools.
Certainly devs earn more money in places like NYC, but they also pay obscene amounts of rent too. And due, the Vancouver tech market is booming.
Don't care. I'd rather live in rural Iowa than either one of those cities. If more than 70% of the men in a given place don't know how to change a spark plug, I'm not moving there. Bonus points are awarded for women who know what a spark plug does, let alone how to change one.
Chose Home and Small Business machines on dell.ca. It wasn't on either. As a purchaser with many options, I won't go through hoops to buy what you obviously don't want to tell me that you offer. I'll just go elsewhere, with the hope that a company more interested in my sale will also be more interested in providing me with a quality product.
Man did not evolve wearing pants. The foreskin ceased to offer protection and became a liability after humankind decided to clothe itself. As one who was circumcised as an adult, I am *very* familiar with the liabilities of a foreskin, and of the backwardness of places where something as simple and common sense as circumcision is not routine. (Case in point: I was born in Europe and therefore was deprived of the benefits of circumcision for my first 22 years.)
Perhaps it's just that I am sufficiently confident in my masculinity that I don't care (or, better still, am glad) that an inconsequential piece of my penis was cut off.
Cut at birth? Think you were robbed of your God-given right to weird odors and infections? Put on a condom, cut off the end of the nipple at the end of it, and wear it 24/7 for the rest of your life. Let me play a tiny violin for your horrible, terrible loss. Seeing as how I've had it both ways, I envy you.
What the hell made Florida ever think that this was a good idea?
The fact that it's FLORIDA. Florida would be a lovely place, if not for the people who live there - especially the politicians!
This data breach is, without question, criminally irresponsible. Wanna bet none of the inbred morons responsible is ever brought to trial?
I'm a Canadian computer geek who wants American citizenship - the only thing keeping me from wgetting the entire site and building an identity is the fact that I'm not a complete asshole.
Dell doesn't really need to be defensive. They do one thing, and they do it really well: Dell builds cheap computers. There's a lot of value there, the quality of their product and support notwithstanding.
Quality of their products? I've always found it to be good - sure, ECS motherboards may be one of their OEM suppliers, but they demand better quality control than ECS' own generic boards.
A big test of the quality of any PC is opening the power supply. In Dells, Compaqs (haven't opened one since the HP merger) and IBM (haven't opened one since the Levono or whatever selloff) I usually find Sprague, Vishay or Nichicon electrolytic capacitors. That's good with me - it means I probably won't have 50 computers waiting for me to recap the power supplies in a year.
(By the way, most of the time when modern electronics fails, it's because of dried out (high ESR) electrolytics.)
Isn't this like Pinocchio claiming that he isn't Geppetto's puppet?
I want a new computer.
On www.dell.ca, I selected a Dimension 3100 - it's all that I need in a general purpose PC. I clicked on the "Customize it!" button. And it seems that I can't get it without Windows. (Not sure if that link will work, it set a few cookies in Firefox.) Furthermore, I have serious issues with any technology company sufficiently ignorant to run IIS.
Though I've always liked Dell hardware, Pinocchio gets no sale from me.
That was a cabinet holding, what look to this ex-stagehand, like a rack of dimmers, not servers. My guess is one channel of dimming or perhaps audio (though no one uses socopex for audio do they?) went up in smoke. It happens sometimes.
[grin] I knew things hadn't changed that much since my days at the SkyDome.
The best part of a blown dimmer pack is the hum as the 60kW or whatever of lighting power is dissipated in one relatively small triac...
4)Shell window open on the desktop, since there's no better way of showing the computer-illiterate masses how easy to use your operating system is. And besides, no one else has anything even approaching a shell window, DOS box or telnet client.
A BS in Computer Science should be easy to get with only average math talent. Can you get a B in Cal I? You can handle the math in CS. Once you get out, you can probably forget it.
As an EE, there are a couple of things I've noted. I went back to school because I knew I could do it, though I thought the math (and electrical engineering is notoriously math-heavy) was going to simply be a bitter pill that I had to swallow.
With a 52% in Grade 12 math, I went back ten years later and got a 71% in OAC (effectively Ontario Grade 13) calculus. I took it again in summer school just before university, and scored a 95% without even cracking open the book.
High school math was boring as hell, all to do with crap like factoring polynomials and slopes of line segments. (When the hell am I ever going to care about the slope of a line segment?)
Then came calculus.
Calculus is arguably the most elegant and powerful human rationalization and discovery. It touches your life everywhere and describes infinite things you can't even begin to imagine. And it requires no intelligence to do well in calculus courses - just attend classes, follow along with examples, and do your homework. Math requires practice.
In order to perform operations of the calculus, you do need those silly things from high school - the ability to factor a polynomial, or to find the slope of a line segment. Once you've got those things, just read the book and do the homework over and over.
My favorite thing about math is that you only need to do enough problems to learn the technique. Do little refreshers every now and then, but once you've got it, you've got it.
University math courses I've taken? Calculus, Differential Equations I and II, Vector Calculus, Linear Algebra, Statistics, Economics, Systems and Simulation (complex transfer functions). All of those courses were pure mathematics. Everything else was four years of applying mathematics from those courses to the analysis of physical phenomena - who's kidding who, my class on Electromagnetic Waves was essentially a course on nothing but rearranging and using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_equations>M axwell's Equations. I am two university credits away from a degree in mathematics, and I'm seriously considering doing them just for the minor.
The elegance of some of this stuff is incredible. e^(i*pi)+1=0 is my personal favorite; I'm considering getting it tattooed.
Oh, and by the way, don't fear the word "calculus". It means "small stones", as used for counting.
Please cast your vote to this wonderful individual.
While he may have committed IT suicide, I doubt if that qualifies for a Darwin.
He can't be far off, though - the very first line of his personal statement on that page includes a grammatical error. Can't be long until he forgets to look both ways before crossing the street.
Apparently some stations are now doing something so you have to decline a car wash before you can start the gas pumping after swiping your card too. To my understanding, my dad was waiting for about three minutes before figuring this out, and was *not* happy about it.
Yeah, it's a little intrusive. Just a bit...
Someone should hack those things to change the options, maybe a randomized thing based on some function of the date and the last digit of the card number, in order to make it seem like an urban legend until you see it for yourself:
Would you like a car wash today?
1. Yes, please.
2. No thanks, I like my paint.
Seriously, who cares? Nobody really watches those screens anyway.
Or watches them specifically to buy from their competitors? (The more annoying the commercial, the more likely I am to buy another product. I don't have a Dyson or an Oreck vacuum cleaner: I have a Hoover. And thanks, I'm not a hausfrau who is sufficiently ignorant of the laws of physics to believe in bagless vacuums not blowing fine clouds everywhere, nor do I wish to have a vacuum cleaner which is so much flimsy crap that it only weighs 8lbs.)
Leslie Moonves at CBS has done a number of very stupid things over the past two years. Dan Rather's booting. Jack FM formats and David Lee Roth. The spite lawsuit against Howard Stern. And now this.
Anyone wanna bet that Howard and Robin are going to have a field day with this one?
1) Can the legislature forbid, say, blasphemy or degrading another religion? What about the Danish Cartoons?
Yup. Although they haven't been tested in court (and to my knowledge, no Canadian publication has carried them), I would be willing to bet that some of them would be considered hate material - Mohammed with the bomb in his turban, for example, might be inciting hatred... although I think it's probably a pretty fair assessment of the way many westerners (especially outside of large cities where they might have actually met a few Muslims) view Islam.
2) Is the limitation on hate speech really demonstrabl justified in a free and democratic society? If so where exactly is that line drawn?
Rather arbitrarily. Howard Stern ran afoul of the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council for racist and mysogenistic remarks. Listen to the show a few times and tell me if he's anything other than a guy who simply makes fun of everybody equally. (Stern is a Jew who is for everything from affirmative action to gay marriage, though he loves to let a KKK guy on the air and laugh at him.)
3) Could the Parliament ban a political party on the grounds that they teach in the abstract a moral duty to the violent overthrow of the government even if no preparations are being made for said insurrection? And was the Communist Party ever so banned?
Probably, but it's not equally applied. I doubt if the Gay Niggers Association of Canada would be censured even if they were running on a platform of killing all straight white people, but if any sort of white supremacist group tried to start a party, you can bet it would be shut down. Recently elected is the Conservative Party of Canada, and several of their MPs ("Congressmen", effectively, but more tightly tied to the Prime Minister) have publicly made hate remarks about gay people. It's highly arbitrary and based on the ever-shifting lines of political correctness encountered in a liberal arts major who wears too much makeup and lives in the Gatineau.
I have not yet found any other country that has the same robust protection on freedom of expression as the US. And I am profoundly grateful for my citizenship in this great republic.
As a Canadian - and a gay one at that - I look fondly south despite the fucktard currently in the White House. There is nothing for which I desire quite so much as what you have, and I am very glad you recognize how fortunate you are.
In other words, you're safe to run an online forum in Canada. If some ass-hat posts something in an attempt to incite hatred towards a group, you're not liable. If, however, you post that hate incitement, you are liable, regardless of the fact that you happen to own the web hosting service you're using.
Even so, this is trampling on Freedom of Speech, the fundamental right upon which all others are based.
How about this: "I hate Stephen Harper, and I hope his government goes down in flames like Bush's presidency." Hate speech, quite literally: "I hate...".
So now we have a reason to force Slashdot to remove this posting. And I can't publicly criticize my government. Welcome to this logical extension to government in Canada.
I'm a Howard Stern fan. He's been shut down by this, too. I fear his tenure on Sirius Canada will be limited as a result of this sort of action. Why? 'Cause Stern makes fun of people and makes racial slurs. Note that Stern's racial slurs are about everyone: white, black, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim - no one is safe, especially not Stern's own lineage. (Hook Nose Mike is a frequent caller so named because he begins every conversation with "Good morning Howard, you hook-nosed Jew bastard". A KKK guy used to do movie reviews on the show while Howard (Jewish) and Robin (black) would make fun of him.) Note that this isn't hate speech - it's all in fun and clearly taking jibes at bigotry - and yet it falls under the CBSC's criteria for taking him off the air.
Now, a white supremacist site is clearly hate speech. Fine. And you know what? I hate them at least as much as they hate everyone else, but I will defend to the death their right to say whatever they want - and the right of every intelligent person to dismiss them as the crackpots they are.
The moral is I wont ever trust one of these companies with my car.
Spend the extra $$ and ship with a company which specializes in moving exotic or antique cars. They'll get a hoot out of parking a Bugatti over your 1992 Shadow.
Or, if it's RWD and you're using a truck, just use a tow-bar like the RV crowd does - it's best to pop out the driveshaft (two bolts on the front yoke, two bolts on the rear yoke) so the transmission isn't turning; neutral usually isn't good enough!. Just remember that you can go miles before you notice a flat tire on your "trailer", so watch the mirrors carefully, and make note of the towing vehicle trying to drag one way or another.
If your vehicle will pull a trailer (even cars can pull a small one) consider having a hitch (about 100-120 dollars) installed or putting one on yourself.
I am *so* glad I'm a pickup truck guy. An *old* truck guy. Constantly I find myself towing a friend or carrying sheets of drywall. Pre-move inspection of the truck included cooling system, brakes, ball joints, universal joints, tires, fluids, engine timing and mixture. Basically, the stuff you should check weekly to monthly if you actually care about your vehicle, but stuff which is especially important when you know you're going to make a heavily laden long trip.
1976 Dodge Ram Heavy Half, then with a 400CID V8. Moving from Toronto to Ottawa, getting onto the second busiest freeway in the world (Hwy 401 through Toronto, second only to Santa Monica Fwy) with all my crap...
5,000lbs in the bed; massively overloaded. On the Class 4 trailer hitch (biggest type of ball hitch) was a four-wheel float car trailer with electric brakes; conservatively 2,000lbs. On the trailer was a 1974 Plymouth Valiant Brougham (3,000lbs) stuffed full of crap (~1000lbs) and my 1954 Maytag washer and 1967 Maytag dryer (~250lbs for the pair) strapped between the Valiant's bumper and the trailer tongue.
I took her slowly up the Don Valley Parkway and got onto the 401 East, express lanes (less people weaving in and out, more professional truckers). I checked the mirror, put on the left turn signal, and stomped on the gas.
The transmission (TorqueFlite 727 automatic at the time) kicked down, the big block V8 roared at me through the firewall, and the damned thing still threw me back in my seat as I crossed the continuity line and merged. The speedometer went from 60km/h (ramp speed with overloaded truck) to 120km/h in what felt like the blink of an eye. My monitor had been sitting on the stack of my computers in the passenger seat footwell, and it fell face forward onto my cat who promptly freaked out and retreated onto my lap where she remained, claws fully embedded in my legs, until the first fuel stop.
Of course, I had to refill the tank in Belleville, then again in Brockville. It takes fuel to make power!
Not cross-country - I wouldn't brave overloading her like that if I didn't know where the cops like to hide - but I'd do it with that truck if I could jettison about 2,000lbs from the bed (mostly damned books and old electronics magazines) and attach the Valiant with a tow-bad to save the float. Hell, it's just me, I'd probably sleep across the bench seat and shower at truck stops!
(Truck's new motor is a 1983 Slant-6 and A-833 overdrive manual four speed; ~25MPG, towing acceleration is like driving a semi-trailer but it gets to speed just fine.)
If you're planning on towing stuff, get an oversized hitch. Make sure you're dealing with a tough vehicle - forget the cute little Honda or other junk. You need rear wheel drive with a full frame - either a pickup truck or a Crown Vic or old Impala. Domestics which share drivetrain components with large numbers of other vehicles over a long production run are the best, since getting parts for anything else in the middle of Kansas might take a while - GM and Ford parts like engine parts, alternators, starters, water pumps, are popular in lots of farm equipment! You need to go over the brakes and cooling system with a fine-toothed comb. If the vehicle doesn't have AC, buy and install an AC radiator since they have more cooling capacity. Add a transmission fluid cooler. Consider adding an engine oil cooler. Add gauges for oil pressure and engine temperature if you don't already have them - idiot lights are too little, too late. Double-check engine timing and mixture are set according to specifications, though if you are crossing high altitudes you might want to tweak the mixture a little rich to help reduce pinging. Plugs, leads, cap, rotor. *ALWAYS* have a spare fanbelt, basic tools, and a fire extinguisher. And make sure the transmission or clutch don't slip even a little bit.
Driving a 24-foot truck for a couple of days through various cities during rush hour has given me a new respect for those folks who drive *real* trucks for a living...
Ah, hell no, it's not that bad driving a big truck. I have my Ontario DZ license, meaning air brakes, etc. - just not buses or semis. And I've driven extensively in Toronto (2 million proper, lots more in the burbs - comparable driving to a cross between Los Angeles and Chicago). Used to drive around a lot of big-assed Hughes video projection equipment when I was a technician.
The key is that when other drivers see a U-Haul or other rental truck, they know you're just a poseur. But when you're driving a Top Kick or International with a company name on the side, they assume you're familiar driving trucks and don't have the "big vehicle paralysis" typical of unfamiliar drivers. You know what I mean: you don't try to do shoulder checks because you've learned to use and trust your mirrors.
Anyone who drives an old full-size domestic pickup truck knows this feeling - cars tend to be afraid of the shiny new Rams, but my '76 Ram with its primer spots and aluminum grille over a steel bumper is a frightening wall of metal in the rear-view mirror of a Honda Accord.
You can also put a lanyard hole in a dead space on the board or epoxy something in there and hang it on your keychange.
DO NOT drill holes through even apparently empty areas of PC boards. Often times, the boards are multilayer and there could be anything from interconnects to inductors and capacitors etched into a buried layer of copper.
Using a bright light may help you see how many layers there are, but usually one of the layers is a ground plane which will obscure your view of all others.
Slashdot Mirror
For sure! There's no faster way to turn a corner (often as an emergency maneouver) than to stomp on the gas of a rear-wheel-drive car and let the back end swing out. When you've got the car in the direction you want, you release the gas. There's nothing to it.
For an excellent demonstration of rear-wheel-drive handling capabilities with a skilled driver, check out the parking lot scene less than 20 minutes into the Blues Brothers, where 4,000lb 1974 to 1978 Dodge Monaco police cars are fishtailing through tight corners between rows of parked cars.
Safety is a great goal, but I want to tell the car what to do - I don't want the car telling me what I can do. There are times when traction control gets completely in the way of non-spirited driving, too (like going up a snow-covered driveway).More importantly, the computer has insufficient knowledge. It doesn't see the guy who just pulled out of his driveway without looking and is directly in your way, so it doesn't understand that you intend to use basic driving techniques to break the back end free and swing the car onto the lawn.
We had one of the first betamax videos when they came out.
I still have one! Free to a good home - want it? (Warning: you pay shipping.) E-mail me, slant6mopar@yahoo.com. If I could find my digital camera (damned miniturization makes things get lost easily!), I'd put photos online. It's a 1975 Sony top-loader with mechanical tuners, and *only supports Beta I* (effectively, SP only - no LP or EP speeds). If there's interest, I'll actually pull it out of the closet and copy down the model number. FOB Ottawa, Canada.
We had it for a couple of monthsHeheh... can you imagine the back injuries? Until the end of Betamax, they were always heavy machines, with a good strong steel chassis. Lovely pieces of work, far more reminiscent of their broadcast quality 3/4" U-Matic brothers than the pedestrian VHS crap.
By that time VHS was taking over, and since we didn't know anyone who'd had a VHS stolen, we replaced those lovely DAT-like betamax tapes for the horror, the horror, of chewed VHS tape.Yah. VHS uses what's called an "M-load" design, while Betamax, 3/4" and all professional formats use a U-load design. While VHS had that Rube Goldberg bicycle-chain-pulls-the-threaders design, everything else had a threading ring which simply rotated and threaded the tape - a lot simpler and less dependent on mechanical tolerances than the multilinks of the VHS threader.
Both machines can chew tape, but even new (and "improved") VHS machines are still criminally reprehensible in the face of Betamax.
Tape rules, bring back the audio cassette (only this time clean yer heads and don't use anything bigger than a C60).Cassettes are crap. Stick with OGG/MP3 for portable use and FLAC for anything serious!
On the other hand, it's a hell of a lot of fun to fire up my Ferrograph, and watch the tape fly by at 15IPS every now and then. Yeah, there's something really deliciously tactile about the analog formats, especially with a good quality machine - the snaps of solenoids, the hum of threading motors, the whirr of the capstan motor.
Having worked as a maintenance and production technician at a TV station during the dying days of Quad, I miss most the "WWWOOOOoooowwww..." of the brakes stopping a full 6lb reel of tape at the end of a rewind cycle. I still have a few scars on my hands from trying to change a tape before the reel stopped, with the director screaming "We're live! We're live!" in my ClearCom.
[sigh]
This is careening waaay off topic, but there are many who yearn for their long-lost foreskin, and despite "restoration" procedures, it'll never be the same as "factory equipment." As someone who was cut at birth, I'll never truly know. Maybe it's kinda like baptism... maybe it's better to let them figure out as an adult what choice they want to make before an irreversable choice is made for them?
Don't worry, the only thing you've missed out on is infections and other trouble. If - for some reason unbeknownst to me - you want a foreskin, I wish I could have given you mine and had all the benefits of being circumcised at birth in your stead.
Speaking of attracting undesireables, I appear to have picked up a stalker, nyahahah! Eh any ACs or GuloGulo (959533) that respond to this message, everyone remember the name, this one is truly half baked.
Hah! Stalkers? Gimme a break. Try carrying around my sig and see how many disgusting uncircumcised Europeans or "I was robbed at birth!" wackos hit me up.
I hope they all get phimosis. Savages.
Ouch. And, for me, I am thankful that it occured early.
Wisdom teeth hurt far more. A broken bone hurts far more. Circumcision hurts, but if you'd had it done as an adult, you'd have been a proponent within the first year.
You must have a fever or something... Wanting to move to a country like that.
What? Of the most friendly people I've ever met (certainly more outgoing than Canadians), with a second-to-none can-do spirit?
Americans are just like Canadians, but on an individual basis they're friendlier, and the hardware stores have more/better tools.
Certainly devs earn more money in places like NYC, but they also pay obscene amounts of rent too. And due, the Vancouver tech market is booming.Don't care. I'd rather live in rural Iowa than either one of those cities. If more than 70% of the men in a given place don't know how to change a spark plug, I'm not moving there. Bonus points are awarded for women who know what a spark plug does, let alone how to change one.
Search for Dell N Series
Chose Home and Small Business machines on dell.ca. It wasn't on either. As a purchaser with many options, I won't go through hoops to buy what you obviously don't want to tell me that you offer. I'll just go elsewhere, with the hope that a company more interested in my sale will also be more interested in providing me with a quality product.
Why are you so proud of slicing your dick?
Man did not evolve wearing pants. The foreskin ceased to offer protection and became a liability after humankind decided to clothe itself. As one who was circumcised as an adult, I am *very* familiar with the liabilities of a foreskin, and of the backwardness of places where something as simple and common sense as circumcision is not routine. (Case in point: I was born in Europe and therefore was deprived of the benefits of circumcision for my first 22 years.)
Perhaps it's just that I am sufficiently confident in my masculinity that I don't care (or, better still, am glad) that an inconsequential piece of my penis was cut off.
Cut at birth? Think you were robbed of your God-given right to weird odors and infections? Put on a condom, cut off the end of the nipple at the end of it, and wear it 24/7 for the rest of your life. Let me play a tiny violin for your horrible, terrible loss. Seeing as how I've had it both ways, I envy you.
Grep for c=us in your link. In my case, c=ca.
Secondly, I shouldn't have to look - if they're not M$'s bitch, a real operating system will be available as an option.
What the hell made Florida ever think that this was a good idea?
The fact that it's FLORIDA. Florida would be a lovely place, if not for the people who live there - especially the politicians!
This data breach is, without question, criminally irresponsible. Wanna bet none of the inbred morons responsible is ever brought to trial?
I'm a Canadian computer geek who wants American citizenship - the only thing keeping me from wgetting the entire site and building an identity is the fact that I'm not a complete asshole.
Dell doesn't really need to be defensive. They do one thing, and they do it really well: Dell builds cheap computers. There's a lot of value there, the quality of their product and support notwithstanding.
Quality of their products? I've always found it to be good - sure, ECS motherboards may be one of their OEM suppliers, but they demand better quality control than ECS' own generic boards.
A big test of the quality of any PC is opening the power supply. In Dells, Compaqs (haven't opened one since the HP merger) and IBM (haven't opened one since the Levono or whatever selloff) I usually find Sprague, Vishay or Nichicon electrolytic capacitors. That's good with me - it means I probably won't have 50 computers waiting for me to recap the power supplies in a year.
(By the way, most of the time when modern electronics fails, it's because of dried out (high ESR) electrolytics.)
Isn't this like Pinocchio claiming that he isn't Geppetto's puppet?
I want a new computer.
On www.dell.ca, I selected a Dimension 3100 - it's all that I need in a general purpose PC. I clicked on the "Customize it!" button. And it seems that I can't get it without Windows. (Not sure if that link will work, it set a few cookies in Firefox.) Furthermore, I have serious issues with any technology company sufficiently ignorant to run IIS.
Though I've always liked Dell hardware, Pinocchio gets no sale from me.
That was a cabinet holding, what look to this ex-stagehand, like a rack of dimmers, not servers. My guess is one channel of dimming or perhaps audio (though no one uses socopex for audio do they?) went up in smoke. It happens sometimes.
[grin] I knew things hadn't changed that much since my days at the SkyDome.
The best part of a blown dimmer pack is the hum as the 60kW or whatever of lighting power is dissipated in one relatively small triac...
4)Shell window open on the desktop, since there's no better way of showing the computer-illiterate masses how easy to use your operating system is. And besides, no one else has anything even approaching a shell window, DOS box or telnet client.
A BS in Computer Science should be easy to get with only average math talent. Can you get a B in Cal I? You can handle the math in CS. Once you get out, you can probably forget it.
As an EE, there are a couple of things I've noted. I went back to school because I knew I could do it, though I thought the math (and electrical engineering is notoriously math-heavy) was going to simply be a bitter pill that I had to swallow.
With a 52% in Grade 12 math, I went back ten years later and got a 71% in OAC (effectively Ontario Grade 13) calculus. I took it again in summer school just before university, and scored a 95% without even cracking open the book.
High school math was boring as hell, all to do with crap like factoring polynomials and slopes of line segments. (When the hell am I ever going to care about the slope of a line segment?)
Then came calculus.
Calculus is arguably the most elegant and powerful human rationalization and discovery. It touches your life everywhere and describes infinite things you can't even begin to imagine. And it requires no intelligence to do well in calculus courses - just attend classes, follow along with examples, and do your homework. Math requires practice.
In order to perform operations of the calculus, you do need those silly things from high school - the ability to factor a polynomial, or to find the slope of a line segment. Once you've got those things, just read the book and do the homework over and over.
My favorite thing about math is that you only need to do enough problems to learn the technique. Do little refreshers every now and then, but once you've got it, you've got it.
University math courses I've taken? Calculus, Differential Equations I and II, Vector Calculus, Linear Algebra, Statistics, Economics, Systems and Simulation (complex transfer functions). All of those courses were pure mathematics. Everything else was four years of applying mathematics from those courses to the analysis of physical phenomena - who's kidding who, my class on Electromagnetic Waves was essentially a course on nothing but rearranging and using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_equations>M axwell's Equations. I am two university credits away from a degree in mathematics, and I'm seriously considering doing them just for the minor.
The elegance of some of this stuff is incredible. e^(i*pi)+1=0 is my personal favorite; I'm considering getting it tattooed.
Oh, and by the way, don't fear the word "calculus". It means "small stones", as used for counting.
Please cast your vote to this wonderful individual.
While he may have committed IT suicide, I doubt if that qualifies for a Darwin.
He can't be far off, though - the very first line of his personal statement on that page includes a grammatical error. Can't be long until he forgets to look both ways before crossing the street.
Apparently some stations are now doing something so you have to decline a car wash before you can start the gas pumping after swiping your card too. To my understanding, my dad was waiting for about three minutes before figuring this out, and was *not* happy about it.
Yeah, it's a little intrusive. Just a bit...
Someone should hack those things to change the options, maybe a randomized thing based on some function of the date and the last digit of the card number, in order to make it seem like an urban legend until you see it for yourself:
Would you like a car wash today?1. Yes, please.
2. No thanks, I like my paint.
Seriously, who cares? Nobody really watches those screens anyway.
Or watches them specifically to buy from their competitors? (The more annoying the commercial, the more likely I am to buy another product. I don't have a Dyson or an Oreck vacuum cleaner: I have a Hoover. And thanks, I'm not a hausfrau who is sufficiently ignorant of the laws of physics to believe in bagless vacuums not blowing fine clouds everywhere, nor do I wish to have a vacuum cleaner which is so much flimsy crap that it only weighs 8lbs.)
Leslie Moonves at CBS has done a number of very stupid things over the past two years. Dan Rather's booting. Jack FM formats and David Lee Roth. The spite lawsuit against Howard Stern. And now this.
Anyone wanna bet that Howard and Robin are going to have a field day with this one?
This has got to be the first time the recording industry has said anything surprising, or possibly realistic regarding piracy.
Actually, it's probably more along the lines of the limited quantities of lame Tragically Hip and Rita MacNeil songs in peoples' MP3 directories.
1) Can the legislature forbid, say, blasphemy or degrading another religion? What about the Danish Cartoons?
Yup. Although they haven't been tested in court (and to my knowledge, no Canadian publication has carried them), I would be willing to bet that some of them would be considered hate material - Mohammed with the bomb in his turban, for example, might be inciting hatred... although I think it's probably a pretty fair assessment of the way many westerners (especially outside of large cities where they might have actually met a few Muslims) view Islam.
2) Is the limitation on hate speech really demonstrabl justified in a free and democratic society? If so where exactly is that line drawn?Rather arbitrarily. Howard Stern ran afoul of the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council for racist and mysogenistic remarks. Listen to the show a few times and tell me if he's anything other than a guy who simply makes fun of everybody equally. (Stern is a Jew who is for everything from affirmative action to gay marriage, though he loves to let a KKK guy on the air and laugh at him.)
3) Could the Parliament ban a political party on the grounds that they teach in the abstract a moral duty to the violent overthrow of the government even if no preparations are being made for said insurrection? And was the Communist Party ever so banned?Probably, but it's not equally applied. I doubt if the Gay Niggers Association of Canada would be censured even if they were running on a platform of killing all straight white people, but if any sort of white supremacist group tried to start a party, you can bet it would be shut down. Recently elected is the Conservative Party of Canada, and several of their MPs ("Congressmen", effectively, but more tightly tied to the Prime Minister) have publicly made hate remarks about gay people. It's highly arbitrary and based on the ever-shifting lines of political correctness encountered in a liberal arts major who wears too much makeup and lives in the Gatineau.
I have not yet found any other country that has the same robust protection on freedom of expression as the US. And I am profoundly grateful for my citizenship in this great republic.As a Canadian - and a gay one at that - I look fondly south despite the fucktard currently in the White House. There is nothing for which I desire quite so much as what you have, and I am very glad you recognize how fortunate you are.
In other words, you're safe to run an online forum in Canada. If some ass-hat posts something in an attempt to incite hatred towards a group, you're not liable. If, however, you post that hate incitement, you are liable, regardless of the fact that you happen to own the web hosting service you're using.
Even so, this is trampling on Freedom of Speech, the fundamental right upon which all others are based.
How about this: "I hate Stephen Harper, and I hope his government goes down in flames like Bush's presidency." Hate speech, quite literally: "I hate...".
So now we have a reason to force Slashdot to remove this posting. And I can't publicly criticize my government. Welcome to this logical extension to government in Canada.
I'm a Howard Stern fan. He's been shut down by this, too. I fear his tenure on Sirius Canada will be limited as a result of this sort of action. Why? 'Cause Stern makes fun of people and makes racial slurs. Note that Stern's racial slurs are about everyone: white, black, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim - no one is safe, especially not Stern's own lineage. (Hook Nose Mike is a frequent caller so named because he begins every conversation with "Good morning Howard, you hook-nosed Jew bastard". A KKK guy used to do movie reviews on the show while Howard (Jewish) and Robin (black) would make fun of him.) Note that this isn't hate speech - it's all in fun and clearly taking jibes at bigotry - and yet it falls under the CBSC's criteria for taking him off the air.
Now, a white supremacist site is clearly hate speech. Fine. And you know what? I hate them at least as much as they hate everyone else, but I will defend to the death their right to say whatever they want - and the right of every intelligent person to dismiss them as the crackpots they are.
The moral is I wont ever trust one of these companies with my car.
Spend the extra $$ and ship with a company which specializes in moving exotic or antique cars. They'll get a hoot out of parking a Bugatti over your 1992 Shadow.
Or, if it's RWD and you're using a truck, just use a tow-bar like the RV crowd does - it's best to pop out the driveshaft (two bolts on the front yoke, two bolts on the rear yoke) so the transmission isn't turning; neutral usually isn't good enough!. Just remember that you can go miles before you notice a flat tire on your "trailer", so watch the mirrors carefully, and make note of the towing vehicle trying to drag one way or another.
If your vehicle will pull a trailer (even cars can pull a small one) consider having a hitch (about 100-120 dollars) installed or putting one on yourself.
I am *so* glad I'm a pickup truck guy. An *old* truck guy. Constantly I find myself towing a friend or carrying sheets of drywall. Pre-move inspection of the truck included cooling system, brakes, ball joints, universal joints, tires, fluids, engine timing and mixture. Basically, the stuff you should check weekly to monthly if you actually care about your vehicle, but stuff which is especially important when you know you're going to make a heavily laden long trip.
1976 Dodge Ram Heavy Half, then with a 400CID V8. Moving from Toronto to Ottawa, getting onto the second busiest freeway in the world (Hwy 401 through Toronto, second only to Santa Monica Fwy) with all my crap...
5,000lbs in the bed; massively overloaded. On the Class 4 trailer hitch (biggest type of ball hitch) was a four-wheel float car trailer with electric brakes; conservatively 2,000lbs. On the trailer was a 1974 Plymouth Valiant Brougham (3,000lbs) stuffed full of crap (~1000lbs) and my 1954 Maytag washer and 1967 Maytag dryer (~250lbs for the pair) strapped between the Valiant's bumper and the trailer tongue.
I took her slowly up the Don Valley Parkway and got onto the 401 East, express lanes (less people weaving in and out, more professional truckers). I checked the mirror, put on the left turn signal, and stomped on the gas.
The transmission (TorqueFlite 727 automatic at the time) kicked down, the big block V8 roared at me through the firewall, and the damned thing still threw me back in my seat as I crossed the continuity line and merged. The speedometer went from 60km/h (ramp speed with overloaded truck) to 120km/h in what felt like the blink of an eye. My monitor had been sitting on the stack of my computers in the passenger seat footwell, and it fell face forward onto my cat who promptly freaked out and retreated onto my lap where she remained, claws fully embedded in my legs, until the first fuel stop.
Of course, I had to refill the tank in Belleville, then again in Brockville. It takes fuel to make power!
Not cross-country - I wouldn't brave overloading her like that if I didn't know where the cops like to hide - but I'd do it with that truck if I could jettison about 2,000lbs from the bed (mostly damned books and old electronics magazines) and attach the Valiant with a tow-bad to save the float. Hell, it's just me, I'd probably sleep across the bench seat and shower at truck stops!
(Truck's new motor is a 1983 Slant-6 and A-833 overdrive manual four speed; ~25MPG, towing acceleration is like driving a semi-trailer but it gets to speed just fine.)
If you're planning on towing stuff, get an oversized hitch. Make sure you're dealing with a tough vehicle - forget the cute little Honda or other junk. You need rear wheel drive with a full frame - either a pickup truck or a Crown Vic or old Impala. Domestics which share drivetrain components with large numbers of other vehicles over a long production run are the best, since getting parts for anything else in the middle of Kansas might take a while - GM and Ford parts like engine parts, alternators, starters, water pumps, are popular in lots of farm equipment! You need to go over the brakes and cooling system with a fine-toothed comb. If the vehicle doesn't have AC, buy and install an AC radiator since they have more cooling capacity. Add a transmission fluid cooler. Consider adding an engine oil cooler. Add gauges for oil pressure and engine temperature if you don't already have them - idiot lights are too little, too late. Double-check engine timing and mixture are set according to specifications, though if you are crossing high altitudes you might want to tweak the mixture a little rich to help reduce pinging. Plugs, leads, cap, rotor. *ALWAYS* have a spare fanbelt, basic tools, and a fire extinguisher. And make sure the transmission or clutch don't slip even a little bit.
Driving a 24-foot truck for a couple of days through various cities during rush hour has given me a new respect for those folks who drive *real* trucks for a living...
Ah, hell no, it's not that bad driving a big truck. I have my Ontario DZ license, meaning air brakes, etc. - just not buses or semis. And I've driven extensively in Toronto (2 million proper, lots more in the burbs - comparable driving to a cross between Los Angeles and Chicago). Used to drive around a lot of big-assed Hughes video projection equipment when I was a technician.
The key is that when other drivers see a U-Haul or other rental truck, they know you're just a poseur. But when you're driving a Top Kick or International with a company name on the side, they assume you're familiar driving trucks and don't have the "big vehicle paralysis" typical of unfamiliar drivers. You know what I mean: you don't try to do shoulder checks because you've learned to use and trust your mirrors.
Anyone who drives an old full-size domestic pickup truck knows this feeling - cars tend to be afraid of the shiny new Rams, but my '76 Ram with its primer spots and aluminum grille over a steel bumper is a frightening wall of metal in the rear-view mirror of a Honda Accord.
You can also put a lanyard hole in a dead space on the board or epoxy something in there and hang it on your keychange.
DO NOT drill holes through even apparently empty areas of PC boards. Often times, the boards are multilayer and there could be anything from interconnects to inductors and capacitors etched into a buried layer of copper.
Using a bright light may help you see how many layers there are, but usually one of the layers is a ground plane which will obscure your view of all others.