Agree with parent. I had a 386sx25 with 4 to 8 megs of RAM running Blackbox on X11. It was my first Linux system, running Slackware 3.something at the time. It was set up to be an internet router in the days before dlink, and it ran Apache to host my collection of cartoon porn.
Being Slackware, these were the days I used to compile my own kernels. It often took most if not all of an overnight session to complete a new kernel.
Is it unusual in your experience for, say, a corporate IT department to destroy hard drives by policy?
During my employ as a contractor with the Canadian Department of National Defence, it was standard for decomissioned (read: hellishly outdated) systems to be stripped of RAM and HD, by policy, before being sold off as a lot as surplus/scrap. The RAM and HD would then be sent to an industrial grade metal shredder at a larger nearby base for destruction.
Granted, this was for workstation systems where no personal or private data was to be stored. Again, by policy. I'm unsure what the policy would be for servers where email was stored. Probably still destroy the physical hard drive, but the final backup tapes are more than likely to be kept under lock and key for eternity.
MP3 aside, if multimedia capability is your goal, Windows does not, has not, and will never "just work". Windows (98, XP, Vista) comes with NO DVD decrypting capability, and you have to BUY (or pirate) a dvd decoder in order to make that functionality work. Also, many, if not all, of the more popularly accepted media formats on the Internet (divx, matroska) are NOT natively supported by Windows, requiring you to search the unfiltered internet for a (hopefully) spyware free pile of codecs.
I'll never claim that Linux is as easy to use for the average user, but that's mostly because the average user can't get their head around anything that isn't "What we use at School" or "What we use at Work". The same mentality exists around people who live in a Mac bubble. They hate Windows for many of the same reasons as Windows users hate Linux (with the addition that Mac users bring up instability, insecurity, and that PCs aren't cosmetically designed by astronauts from the future).
And while we're talking about basic functionality, it's taken me days of tweaking and futzing the registry in Vista to get it to talk to XP, OSX and Linux machines over SMB, the very thing you were saying "just worked". The default LMCompat configuration in Vista has changed from all previous incarnations of Windows, so now by default Vista seems only to communicate with Vista (or an XBOX 360).
I suspect its because you either are not a gamer, don't read gamer publications, or live under some sort of gamer rock. I am a mild to non gamer myself, and have heard of this game, though I have never seen it or played it nor was I sure what platform it was for or who had created it. Penny Arcade had several comics regarding it, and many times I've seen gamers nerdgasm over it's puzzles and gameplay on forums.
But yes, your point of "I don't care about this, so why should I care" is well taken.
8 coupled with 7 and 2 make my daily life miserable.
"Its your job, deal with it" is true, and I say that (paraphrased) to my co-workers regularly, but the UBER entitled user (why do I have to wait 2 hours JUST to have you clean this virus off my system? I need it NOW!) along with the fact that WiFi only mostly works (Why can't I talk on MSN over wireless? Just because I'm trying to use it while on a train that keeps going in and out of the city wifi area doesn't mean I shouldn't be able to stay connected!!) make my job of a support tech at a highly laptop-reliant company frustrating, at best.
Also, no one ever does backups, despite the fact that we lose at least 2 hard drives a day, sometimes as many as 8 or 10 (we have over 4000 laptops in circulation, most under at least mild abuse, many under extreme abuse).
We've had 8 laptops stolen in the last 2 months, and replace around 10 system boards a week, mostly due to liquid spills and drops while cables are plugged in.
Luckily every one of the 4000 laptops in circulation is the same model, though this brings its own headaches, because if one laptop is factory-faulty, many will be. With this model, its the AC adapters and batteries that shit the bed.
All I can say is that I'm glad the IBM iSeries we used one year is long gone, because with those, if you put an extra piece of ram in the spare slot, the network stopped working.
Now that I think of it, I believe my old Analog cell did something like that. Every half hour or so while driving in my car with the phone on ready my subwoofer would go "THUB-thubthubthub". I just thought my amp was on the hose, until a couple times when I didn't have my phone with me, and it didn't do it, then i started piecing it together. Was a long time ago and I'd forgotten.
I wasn't sure I believed either of the parents, so I just tried it myself. AM/FM makes no difference. when a cell phone was held near a radio (near the antenna, near the speaker and touching antenna to antenna) in the standby mode, while dialing, while connected or while receiving a call, nothing happened on the radio. Not a single bit of noise or static. Does this "noise" spoken of only occur when the cell phone drops to analog mode?
One time I was playing around with a C-BAND dish (those big ugly satellite dishes your rich uncle had that he stole skinamax on). I had the LNB (pick up eye) hooked to a spectrum analyzer and was looking for satellites to peruse, and I noticed that there was a constant, clipped spike (past the limits of the analyzer's upper bar) around 2.4GHz, no matter if the dish was pointed at the sky, at the ground, directly into the building, or if the eye was off the dish entirely, it never changed.
I unplugged out 802.11g box to see if that was causing it, and it didn't make one difference in the size of the spike. The world is so flooded with consumer electronics that run at that frequency that it makes no never mind whether you, personally, give it up or not.
I'd be a lot more worried about crusading against the, undoubtedly high, levels of mold and mildew that no doubt infests the circulation system at such an instititution, as I've never worked in a school that had good air quality besides the new high school they built on the hill last year, and that was only good until the students showed up.
Complete, utter and blatant horse shit, my good man. I work in a university tech support center, and my signifigant other always replies to my "people are idiots" rants with "no one is good at everything" and "you have no patience for people who know less about computers than you do".
I had not one, but three people today ask me if they could borrow a stapler. To which I reply "its over there on that desk on the chain" (in plain sight). They then proceed to look all over the desk for this mysterious stapler, which is on the end of a chain. They then find the chain, and procede to feed it back through their hands in an attempt to find the end (it's 3 feet long) and end up at the end that's bolted to the desk, not the stapler, and then look at my confused.
Also: At my university, students are issued a laptop as part of their tuition/curriculum, so there are, at any time, about 5000 laptops out and about. Quite often, I'll get the call "My laptop doesn't turn on.. I push the button and nothing happens". So I respond with "Is it plugged in?" and they say "Does it have to be? I've run it for about 2 or 3 hours now and it's run fine without being plugged in".
That's not a "techno idiot" problem. That's your ordinary, run of the mill idiot, since battery technology has been around since Jesus roped cattle.
"Bravo"? "Thank you for lending credence to our claims"?
Intelligent design is not creationism. Creationism implies "poof, humans exist because God says so". Intelligent Design says "Evolution occurs because it was guided by God to give humans as the final outcome". I think ID is a much more sensible idea than Creationism and, inevitably, will be what the church adopts, just as they, eventually, adopted the idea of a Copernican universe, despite long, long years of keeping an Aristotlian view.
ID doesn't say "Evolution is a crock", just "Random evolution is a crock". It's a much softer edged view and fits well with both the theme of the bible, if not the text, as well as meshing more or less with the secular evidence.
This feels like an episode of Stargate SG-1 where Carter says something technical to explain a wormhole phenomenon, and all the military guys start looking at each other like monkeys looking for poop to fling while I'm yelling at the screen in frustration because whatever she said, while sci-fi-ish in its veracity wasn't as hard to follow as the writers tried to make it seem.
Probably the same way they disinfect the scopes that go up the bum, I'd wager. Once it's done it's job, it goes into a heated vat of disinfectant, then stored in a sterile environment until it's up the pooper again.
More often than not, the ground floor of a high rise building has some sort of infrastructure to divert accidental collision from ground vehicles, like a long flight of concrete steps, or some sort of cement and steel posts or something of the like. The upper floors are mostly glass. A lot more damage would occur from that person talking on their cell phone while flying.
Dr. Brown could do that because, as a time traveler, he already knew that Western Union still existed. How could a native of 1885 possibly have assumed that?
True, a native of 1885 mightn't have assumed that. But knowing how long the company has been around now, by 2006, I think it's a fair assumption that the company isn't going to be going under any time soon. And if they ever did start performing such services as this, en masse, they'd most likely undertake steps to ensure that, if the company does fold, all these records would be passed on. This would be costly, but if you're sleeping for a few hundred years, a small slice of your interest would more than pay for it.
Short of a drastic restructuring of human economical structure, I can't see companies such as WU ever vanishing, just evolving.
I was just scrolling through/. this morning, and I was like "Oh.. Inflatable space station, huh? That sounds kind of interesting, future of mankind and all that.. I'll check that out.. OMG DRAGONLANCE MOVIE FTW!"
I haven't even read Dragonlance for over a decade, but I'm stoked. Even if the movie is terrible, its like tasting some forgotten candy you haven't had since you were a kid, even if you found the candy in the couch.
As far as I know there wasn't any such cartoon. I was an enormous DL fan when I was an adolescent (28 now). The first book in the series was printed in 1984 (Autumn Twilight), so I guess it's possible, but IMDB has nothing on a Dragonlance entity of any kind, except this one, and a quick google search just brings back this same future release.
Slashdot Mirror
Contrary to popular belief. The darker the roast, the lesser the caffeine content.
Agree with parent. I had a 386sx25 with 4 to 8 megs of RAM running Blackbox on X11. It was my first Linux system, running Slackware 3.something at the time. It was set up to be an internet router in the days before dlink, and it ran Apache to host my collection of cartoon porn.
Being Slackware, these were the days I used to compile my own kernels. It often took most if not all of an overnight session to complete a new kernel.
Is it unusual in your experience for, say, a corporate IT department to destroy hard drives by policy?
During my employ as a contractor with the Canadian Department of National Defence, it was standard for decomissioned (read: hellishly outdated) systems to be stripped of RAM and HD, by policy, before being sold off as a lot as surplus/scrap. The RAM and HD would then be sent to an industrial grade metal shredder at a larger nearby base for destruction.
Granted, this was for workstation systems where no personal or private data was to be stored. Again, by policy. I'm unsure what the policy would be for servers where email was stored. Probably still destroy the physical hard drive, but the final backup tapes are more than likely to be kept under lock and key for eternity.
MP3 aside, if multimedia capability is your goal, Windows does not, has not, and will never "just work". Windows (98, XP, Vista) comes with NO DVD decrypting capability, and you have to BUY (or pirate) a dvd decoder in order to make that functionality work. Also, many, if not all, of the more popularly accepted media formats on the Internet (divx, matroska) are NOT natively supported by Windows, requiring you to search the unfiltered internet for a (hopefully) spyware free pile of codecs.
I'll never claim that Linux is as easy to use for the average user, but that's mostly because the average user can't get their head around anything that isn't "What we use at School" or "What we use at Work". The same mentality exists around people who live in a Mac bubble. They hate Windows for many of the same reasons as Windows users hate Linux (with the addition that Mac users bring up instability, insecurity, and that PCs aren't cosmetically designed by astronauts from the future).
And while we're talking about basic functionality, it's taken me days of tweaking and futzing the registry in Vista to get it to talk to XP, OSX and Linux machines over SMB, the very thing you were saying "just worked". The default LMCompat configuration in Vista has changed from all previous incarnations of Windows, so now by default Vista seems only to communicate with Vista (or an XBOX 360).
I suspect its because you either are not a gamer, don't read gamer publications, or live under some sort of gamer rock. I am a mild to non gamer myself, and have heard of this game, though I have never seen it or played it nor was I sure what platform it was for or who had created it. Penny Arcade had several comics regarding it, and many times I've seen gamers nerdgasm over it's puzzles and gameplay on forums.
But yes, your point of "I don't care about this, so why should I care" is well taken.
8 coupled with 7 and 2 make my daily life miserable.
"Its your job, deal with it" is true, and I say that (paraphrased) to my co-workers regularly, but the UBER entitled user (why do I have to wait 2 hours JUST to have you clean this virus off my system? I need it NOW!) along with the fact that WiFi only mostly works (Why can't I talk on MSN over wireless? Just because I'm trying to use it while on a train that keeps going in and out of the city wifi area doesn't mean I shouldn't be able to stay connected!!) make my job of a support tech at a highly laptop-reliant company frustrating, at best.
Also, no one ever does backups, despite the fact that we lose at least 2 hard drives a day, sometimes as many as 8 or 10 (we have over 4000 laptops in circulation, most under at least mild abuse, many under extreme abuse).
We've had 8 laptops stolen in the last 2 months, and replace around 10 system boards a week, mostly due to liquid spills and drops while cables are plugged in.
Luckily every one of the 4000 laptops in circulation is the same model, though this brings its own headaches, because if one laptop is factory-faulty, many will be. With this model, its the AC adapters and batteries that shit the bed.
All I can say is that I'm glad the IBM iSeries we used one year is long gone, because with those, if you put an extra piece of ram in the spare slot, the network stopped working.
Or $48.86 Canadian!
I'll need pizza pockets and star trek tapes.
You've forgotten one thing, mate.
f. She was lying about her caloric intake, and when no one was looking, sucked back a can of coke to wash down the box of twinkies.
Now that I think of it, I believe my old Analog cell did something like that. Every half hour or so while driving in my car with the phone on ready my subwoofer would go "THUB-thubthubthub". I just thought my amp was on the hose, until a couple times when I didn't have my phone with me, and it didn't do it, then i started piecing it together. Was a long time ago and I'd forgotten.
I wasn't sure I believed either of the parents, so I just tried it myself. AM/FM makes no difference. when a cell phone was held near a radio (near the antenna, near the speaker and touching antenna to antenna) in the standby mode, while dialing, while connected or while receiving a call, nothing happened on the radio. Not a single bit of noise or static. Does this "noise" spoken of only occur when the cell phone drops to analog mode?
Also, he had super speed, though I'm not sure if that was from the beginning or developed later on.
One time I was playing around with a C-BAND dish (those big ugly satellite dishes your rich uncle had that he stole skinamax on). I had the LNB (pick up eye) hooked to a spectrum analyzer and was looking for satellites to peruse, and I noticed that there was a constant, clipped spike (past the limits of the analyzer's upper bar) around 2.4GHz, no matter if the dish was pointed at the sky, at the ground, directly into the building, or if the eye was off the dish entirely, it never changed.
I unplugged out 802.11g box to see if that was causing it, and it didn't make one difference in the size of the spike. The world is so flooded with consumer electronics that run at that frequency that it makes no never mind whether you, personally, give it up or not.
I'd be a lot more worried about crusading against the, undoubtedly high, levels of mold and mildew that no doubt infests the circulation system at such an instititution, as I've never worked in a school that had good air quality besides the new high school they built on the hill last year, and that was only good until the students showed up.
Complete, utter and blatant horse shit, my good man. I work in a university tech support center, and my signifigant other always replies to my "people are idiots" rants with "no one is good at everything" and "you have no patience for people who know less about computers than you do".
I had not one, but three people today ask me if they could borrow a stapler. To which I reply "its over there on that desk on the chain" (in plain sight). They then proceed to look all over the desk for this mysterious stapler, which is on the end of a chain. They then find the chain, and procede to feed it back through their hands in an attempt to find the end (it's 3 feet long) and end up at the end that's bolted to the desk, not the stapler, and then look at my confused.
Also: At my university, students are issued a laptop as part of their tuition/curriculum, so there are, at any time, about 5000 laptops out and about. Quite often, I'll get the call "My laptop doesn't turn on.. I push the button and nothing happens". So I respond with "Is it plugged in?" and they say "Does it have to be? I've run it for about 2 or 3 hours now and it's run fine without being plugged in".
That's not a "techno idiot" problem. That's your ordinary, run of the mill idiot, since battery technology has been around since Jesus roped cattle.
"Bravo"? "Thank you for lending credence to our claims"?
Intelligent design is not creationism. Creationism implies "poof, humans exist because God says so". Intelligent Design says "Evolution occurs because it was guided by God to give humans as the final outcome". I think ID is a much more sensible idea than Creationism and, inevitably, will be what the church adopts, just as they, eventually, adopted the idea of a Copernican universe, despite long, long years of keeping an Aristotlian view.
ID doesn't say "Evolution is a crock", just "Random evolution is a crock". It's a much softer edged view and fits well with both the theme of the bible, if not the text, as well as meshing more or less with the secular evidence.
http://wow.blupp.net/item.php?id=356484 Eerie.
This feels like an episode of Stargate SG-1 where Carter says something technical to explain a wormhole phenomenon, and all the military guys start looking at each other like monkeys looking for poop to fling while I'm yelling at the screen in frustration because whatever she said, while sci-fi-ish in its veracity wasn't as hard to follow as the writers tried to make it seem.
Look at that, that's all one sentence, isn't it?
Probably the same way they disinfect the scopes that go up the bum, I'd wager. Once it's done it's job, it goes into a heated vat of disinfectant, then stored in a sterile environment until it's up the pooper again.
The same place everything goes down there. Washed out with the tide.
More often than not, the ground floor of a high rise building has some sort of infrastructure to divert accidental collision from ground vehicles, like a long flight of concrete steps, or some sort of cement and steel posts or something of the like. The upper floors are mostly glass. A lot more damage would occur from that person talking on their cell phone while flying.
You mean like email, word documents and such? God.. who knows?
If that were the case, it would be a boon to India's economy, not Europe's.
True, a native of 1885 mightn't have assumed that. But knowing how long the company has been around now, by 2006, I think it's a fair assumption that the company isn't going to be going under any time soon. And if they ever did start performing such services as this, en masse, they'd most likely undertake steps to ensure that, if the company does fold, all these records would be passed on. This would be costly, but if you're sleeping for a few hundred years, a small slice of your interest would more than pay for it.
Short of a drastic restructuring of human economical structure, I can't see companies such as WU ever vanishing, just evolving.
I was just scrolling through /. this morning, and I was like "Oh.. Inflatable space station, huh? That sounds kind of interesting, future of mankind and all that.. I'll check that out.. OMG DRAGONLANCE MOVIE FTW!"
I haven't even read Dragonlance for over a decade, but I'm stoked. Even if the movie is terrible, its like tasting some forgotten candy you haven't had since you were a kid, even if you found the candy in the couch.
As far as I know there wasn't any such cartoon. I was an enormous DL fan when I was an adolescent (28 now). The first book in the series was printed in 1984 (Autumn Twilight), so I guess it's possible, but IMDB has nothing on a Dragonlance entity of any kind, except this one, and a quick google search just brings back this same future release.