Yeah man, I totally love joe. I've been using that editor since when I first downloaded Linux (Slackware) over a BBS in the late nineties. It bridged the gap between my experiences with vi (which were the result of running the Waffle BBS software package) and my power-user status with that old workhorse for MS-DOS, QEdit, which was just starting to get crappy while Semware took their little tight shareware app and tricked it out to be a commercial product (which apparently is keeping them in business??)
Joe has the simplicity of MS-DOS EDIT.COM/EXE with much, much more power, and is a nice way to get used to using a *NIX-based system; luckily it's managed to stick around in the cut-throat unix text editor marketplace *ahem*...
Yeah, definitely. There are less providers here in Canada, but of course! There is less population to serve. Even Shaw or Rogers (although I've never been a customer of the latter) at their worst beats most American cable internet/DSL companies... there is very little saturation of the lines in Canada and our infrastructure is newer especially in certain places, like here in Alberta. The crap-ass service is a result of corporate policy, not being "inferior" to the US in terms of our internet connectivity. Plus, let's not forget that we don't have PATRIOT-Act approved certified internet surveillance at an ISP level here in the GWN...
But by NOT entering the Chinese market, aren't they also saying that they know what's best for Chinese people? In a protest vote sort of way?
Westerners in general don't understand Chinese culture or government enough to judge either way what is best for Chinese people. They're just doing what they predict is best for "people" which is a search engine that is at least partially able to function in a country with an oppressive government. But uh... that's kinda the same thing they are doing in the US.... what's the big deal?
Also:
The problem with google's line of ethical reasoning has to do with their predictive capabilities. How in hell do you evaluate which is better? The only widely recognized framework whereby decisions as to what is best for a large number of people can be made is a democratic election/governmental process.
Well... that assumes (in other words, predicts) that "widely recognized framework" necessarily means "correct, workable, and Right framework for the most people" which, in order to assert, requires an equally or greater proof of predictive abilities. We have never lived in a time of greater democracy-laden market economies than currently, and while we might be able to predict how it's all going to play out long term, we don't necessarily know that it might not be a bad thing to protect the unwashed masses from things that may hurt their tiny human brains. Not saying that I agree with China's decision to censor the internet (and indeed all media) or anything -- I'm just saying that we have no business trying to use commercial/democratic force to change their government. You don't see them covertly trying to censor OUR media... and they wouldn't have any place doing so. They cooperate with us because it is predicted that cooperation in the face of no other option is better than forcing everyone to do like they do. We can probably do the same without really hurting anything or anyone. Can't prove otherwise, either...
Note: Verizon owns a bunch of shares in the TELUS Mobility company (their cellular branch) but I don't think they are anywhere close to "Telus's Parent Company".
IGnatius, I gotta say "Thanks" for the fact that basically without your efforts and your BBS, Citadel would be a dead system. For years I ran a C-86 board in Edmonton (well, several different ones actually) and it was part of C-86Net and received posts from your old version of Uncensored at various times. I loved that room-based, text-scrolling BBS software. And all of the clones and re-makes of Citadel for different platforms over the years made for a lot of really interesting mods, but the UNIX port you guys did was second to none and the only modern Citadel. Big ups to you for representing not only the BBS scene but proving the worth of Citadel (even now) to all the overly-ANSIfied, expensive WWIV clones out there...;)
That was an awesome game! Good thing you can still play it... somebody made a web port of the game (and released it under the Creative Commons license). I like how you can use the hotkeys that the old door game used to use and you're not forced to use the mouse... how great is that?
If you had went to the Apple web site while you were still looking for 9.1 (before you tried OS X), you could have downloaded that update for free and not had any of the hassle you incurred afterwards.
Wow... it appears that you didn't know much about how to do basic administrative tasks on the Mac. As a professional Mac admin, it is obvious that the first place to look for a software update or a firmware update is Apple's website. A quick search in their tech support website resulted in this knowledge base article about the available updates for Mac OS 9. The article contains links to all the various updates required to bring Mac OS 9 up to 9.2.2. It's a very important source for information when you're dealing with this sort of issue. You should have been able to select "Quit Installer" from the Installer menu at the top of the screen when in the OS X installer, and no, the Finder isn't useful unless you have an installed Mac OS X that you've booted up from. When you selected "Quit Installer" it would have restarted the computer, and if not, there is also a hardware reset button like the kind on PCs on the side of the iMac, which you may or may not need a straightened out paper clip to access (one of the most important tools when fixing a broken older Mac). To get the disc out, you could have also used that same paper clip to push the manual release hole in the front of the CD drive.
The thing about Macs that people running PCs need to remember is that there is only one source of hardware and OS, so if something OS-related or hardware-related needs to be updated there's only one place you need to check first. You can also, on this same website, find the firmware update you probably needed. The Mac tech support guys you talked to were well-meaning but misinformed -- older Macs do not support the mouse-holding-down trick, and the firmware updating button on the side of the machine (also known as the Programmer's Button) only is to be used when you've already ran the installer to upgrade the firmware, and will not reset existing broken firmware. I highly doubt that running the OS X installer broke your firmware on the Mac anyway, that's now how it works. However, unplugging the Mac abruptly could have damaged the power supply, fried the PRAM, or zapped the Mac OS ROM chips on the logic board. There are procedures and things you need to know when administering a Mac that don't apply or aren't the same in the PC world, and just because you are a PC guru doesn't mean you are qualified to administer a Mac. This could have all been properly done by taking your Mac to a service centre to upgrade to OS 9.1 if you didn't know how to do that yourself. (which is no big deal, it's not something a non-Mac user would be familiar with).
As for the overall experience you had, it sounds like a bad one, but that's how OS 9 and older iMacs were. It's why everyone loves the "New World" line of PowerMacs and OS X. Most of your problems were a result of the stuff that Apple had to fix, and they mostly have solved those issues these days. Would you have refused to buy a current PC because of how bad Windows 98 was or how shoddily manufactured a lot of budget PC hardware was 8 years ago?
The fact that crap movies still get stolen is attributable to the fact that marketing for crap movies is often more effective than the movie itself, and those downloading are either (a) succumbing to that marketing blitz or (b) downloading for someone else who has fallen for said blitz.
People don't download crap just for the sake of downloading it. They are convinced it's not crap. Your kids want to see that Garfield movie because the TV showed them the best parts of it.
The only exception to this logic is the genre known as "so bad it's good". But that's just a fluke -- the studio probably wasn't trying to make it so bad you want to watch it to laugh at how bad it is.
Unfortunately, guess who is the new owner of Virtual PC? And also unfortunately, they haven't gotten around to porting Virtual PC to the G5 processor yet... so I have to run it on my G3 iBook 900. And Windows XP isn't so fast when you're emulating it on a CPU that could barely run it natively very well (if it were native to this architecture).
Good question: I'm not sure of the answer, but it could have something to do with the way I change it: I have to log on to the Account Management page and change my customer name. After a few days, whatever I entered in as my customer name starts showing up on people's phones as my caller name. It doesn't happen immediately, though. Strange indeed...
I use a small Voice over IP company for my home telephone service and I am able to change what my outgoing name says, but I cannot change the number that gets displayed. I'm not sure but it seems to me that this is pretty harmless and fun, because it always still shows my correct phone number. Right now, when I call people, it says "PRANK CALL" on the caller ID. Ha!.... well, I think it's funny anyways.
Well, that was in the news indeed and it's why I mentioned it, however it's important to note that while the official media spin is that we are debt free, in fact we are bound to paying down our debt until 2008, due to long-term financing agreements and obligations. In fact, the opposition parties attacked the provincial government's use of "accounting tricks" to make it appear as if we are debt-free so that Ralph Klein will be re-elected. The article you read in the news was simply a regurgitation of the official press release that was put out, and was not representative of the actual truth. Just like most news articles, I guess...
Not every place in Canada has a ridiculous sales tax on products and services. There is a PST (Provincial Sales Tax) in all provinces except Alberta, and there is a GST (General Sales Tax) of 7% that is across canada. The PST is set by the province and can range from nothing (like Alberta) to hovering around 10%. It gets added onto the GST, so if you're paying 8% PST and 7% GST you've got $1.15 CAD to to pay every $1 something is priced at.
Anyway, if you're shocked by high taxes in Canada, Alberta is the place to go - low taxes, the provincial government runs without a deficit and the alcoholic everyman redneck Premier (think Governor) runs the province like a business, and as a result we are nearly debt-free.
Here in Edmonton the cost of living is low, but IT jobs are hard to get unless you know someone or are willing to work low-level helpdesk jobs. I work as IT Manager for a local publishing and marketing company (which employs about 50 people) and am paid on the low scale of what someone in my position would make (I earn in the $30,000 - 40,000 CAD range). However, because the cost of living is low and taxes aren't too bad, I at 24 years old am a homeowner and enjoy a comfortable standard of living.
Some of my friends have done IT jobs that earn upwards from $40,000 - $60,000 but you need a combination of luck, determination, high skill and good connections to land that sort of salary doing IT here. If you're missing any single one of those traits (like I admittedly am) then you have to settle for what you get.
A lot of brilliant technology-oriented minds end up in shitty call centre jobs employed by Americans trying to save money by outsourcing to Canada, but it's a mixed blessing really. Those people would not be working in their field if it wasn't for those jobs, and they pay well enough that you can not feel live a welfare case.
Exactly... does this mean that if I had (for example) a vacuum cleaner company and I paid some studio to create a highly catchy jingle, and then paid for MASSIVE blanket advertising of my company in 30-second spots on all formats of radio across the US, that my jingle is eligible to be in the top 40 charts? It doesn't make any sense. Any paid advertising should not count as a "spin" since the radio station isn't playing what could be considered anything other than advertising, and advertisements aren't part of the assinine charting system. Seems like that logic, if enforced, would do a lot towards stifling this legalized Payola.
That's completely true.... I just got a G5 last weekend after owning my iPod for about 4 months. I convinced my boss to buy it for me (we are an all-mac company and I am the I.T. Manager) and traded him my old PC for it (who he is giving to his father-in-law).
All in all, the iPod i bought really made me salivate for a computer that matched its elegance, logical design and stable, worry-free performance. Bye bye, Windows-flavoured PC... (I love *NIX but I've never had the time or interest to spend days and days configuring my computer to do even simple tasks like recognize and use all of my hardware, thus I've just casually ran Windows at home for years).
Not so simple. I get spam because my email address is listed on the WHOIS database online, for several domain names which I have registered. I know this because I listed my work email address for I am the IT contact at my job for my work's domain names, and they were fresh, new email addresses that I haven't used on any websites for anything yet, and the spam started coming within a week of my email addresses becoming visible/searchable via WHOIS.
I don't solicit marketing. Any other ideas how I could eliminate this spam?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah man, I totally love joe. I've been using that editor since when I first downloaded Linux (Slackware) over a BBS in the late nineties. It bridged the gap between my experiences with vi (which were the result of running the Waffle BBS software package) and my power-user status with that old workhorse for MS-DOS, QEdit, which was just starting to get crappy while Semware took their little tight shareware app and tricked it out to be a commercial product (which apparently is keeping them in business??)
Joe has the simplicity of MS-DOS EDIT.COM/EXE with much, much more power, and is a nice way to get used to using a *NIX-based system; luckily it's managed to stick around in the cut-throat unix text editor marketplace *ahem*...
Well.. not THE ONLY one... (see sig)
Yeah, definitely. There are less providers here in Canada, but of course! There is less population to serve. Even Shaw or Rogers (although I've never been a customer of the latter) at their worst beats most American cable internet/DSL companies... there is very little saturation of the lines in Canada and our infrastructure is newer especially in certain places, like here in Alberta. The crap-ass service is a result of corporate policy, not being "inferior" to the US in terms of our internet connectivity. Plus, let's not forget that we don't have PATRIOT-Act approved certified internet surveillance at an ISP level here in the GWN...
Wheeee!
I, for one, welcome our new Nixon overlords.
Bah, I couldn't resist... it's a Friday afternoon and things are running too smoothly for me to want to touch anything at the office.
Westerners in general don't understand Chinese culture or government enough to judge either way what is best for Chinese people. They're just doing what they predict is best for "people" which is a search engine that is at least partially able to function in a country with an oppressive government. But uh... that's kinda the same thing they are doing in the US.... what's the big deal?
Also:
Well... that assumes (in other words, predicts) that "widely recognized framework" necessarily means "correct, workable, and Right framework for the most people" which, in order to assert, requires an equally or greater proof of predictive abilities. We have never lived in a time of greater democracy-laden market economies than currently, and while we might be able to predict how it's all going to play out long term, we don't necessarily know that it might not be a bad thing to protect the unwashed masses from things that may hurt their tiny human brains. Not saying that I agree with China's decision to censor the internet (and indeed all media) or anything -- I'm just saying that we have no business trying to use commercial/democratic force to change their government. You don't see them covertly trying to censor OUR media... and they wouldn't have any place doing so. They cooperate with us because it is predicted that cooperation in the face of no other option is better than forcing everyone to do like they do. We can probably do the same without really hurting anything or anyone. Can't prove otherwise, either...
Nice! A Bob the Angry Flower reference on Slashdot. Never thought I'd see the day...
Well duh, he's a North American consumer. It's what they do/are.
Note: Verizon owns a bunch of shares in the TELUS Mobility company (their cellular branch) but I don't think they are anywhere close to "Telus's Parent Company".
IGnatius, I gotta say "Thanks" for the fact that basically without your efforts and your BBS, Citadel would be a dead system. For years I ran a C-86 board in Edmonton (well, several different ones actually) and it was part of C-86Net and received posts from your old version of Uncensored at various times. I loved that room-based, text-scrolling BBS software. And all of the clones and re-makes of Citadel for different platforms over the years made for a lot of really interesting mods, but the UNIX port you guys did was second to none and the only modern Citadel. Big ups to you for representing not only the BBS scene but proving the worth of Citadel (even now) to all the overly-ANSIfied, expensive WWIV clones out there... ;)
That was an awesome game! Good thing you can still play it... somebody made a web port of the game (and released it under the Creative Commons license). I like how you can use the hotkeys that the old door game used to use and you're not forced to use the mouse... how great is that?
If you had went to the Apple web site while you were still looking for 9.1 (before you tried OS X), you could have downloaded that update for free and not had any of the hassle you incurred afterwards.
Wow... it appears that you didn't know much about how to do basic administrative tasks on the Mac. As a professional Mac admin, it is obvious that the first place to look for a software update or a firmware update is Apple's website. A quick search in their tech support website resulted in this knowledge base article about the available updates for Mac OS 9. The article contains links to all the various updates required to bring Mac OS 9 up to 9.2.2. It's a very important source for information when you're dealing with this sort of issue. You should have been able to select "Quit Installer" from the Installer menu at the top of the screen when in the OS X installer, and no, the Finder isn't useful unless you have an installed Mac OS X that you've booted up from. When you selected "Quit Installer" it would have restarted the computer, and if not, there is also a hardware reset button like the kind on PCs on the side of the iMac, which you may or may not need a straightened out paper clip to access (one of the most important tools when fixing a broken older Mac). To get the disc out, you could have also used that same paper clip to push the manual release hole in the front of the CD drive.
The thing about Macs that people running PCs need to remember is that there is only one source of hardware and OS, so if something OS-related or hardware-related needs to be updated there's only one place you need to check first. You can also, on this same website, find the firmware update you probably needed. The Mac tech support guys you talked to were well-meaning but misinformed -- older Macs do not support the mouse-holding-down trick, and the firmware updating button on the side of the machine (also known as the Programmer's Button) only is to be used when you've already ran the installer to upgrade the firmware, and will not reset existing broken firmware. I highly doubt that running the OS X installer broke your firmware on the Mac anyway, that's now how it works. However, unplugging the Mac abruptly could have damaged the power supply, fried the PRAM, or zapped the Mac OS ROM chips on the logic board. There are procedures and things you need to know when administering a Mac that don't apply or aren't the same in the PC world, and just because you are a PC guru doesn't mean you are qualified to administer a Mac. This could have all been properly done by taking your Mac to a service centre to upgrade to OS 9.1 if you didn't know how to do that yourself. (which is no big deal, it's not something a non-Mac user would be familiar with).
As for the overall experience you had, it sounds like a bad one, but that's how OS 9 and older iMacs were. It's why everyone loves the "New World" line of PowerMacs and OS X. Most of your problems were a result of the stuff that Apple had to fix, and they mostly have solved those issues these days. Would you have refused to buy a current PC because of how bad Windows 98 was or how shoddily manufactured a lot of budget PC hardware was 8 years ago?
The fact that crap movies still get stolen is attributable to the fact that marketing for crap movies is often more effective than the movie itself, and those downloading are either (a) succumbing to that marketing blitz or (b) downloading for someone else who has fallen for said blitz.
People don't download crap just for the sake of downloading it. They are convinced it's not crap. Your kids want to see that Garfield movie because the TV showed them the best parts of it.
The only exception to this logic is the genre known as "so bad it's good". But that's just a fluke -- the studio probably wasn't trying to make it so bad you want to watch it to laugh at how bad it is.
Whoops, my mistake.. looks like the XP Pro version of it just came out recently. Shoulda read deeper into the page before I linked it I guess...
Unfortunately, guess who is the new owner of Virtual PC? And also unfortunately, they haven't gotten around to porting Virtual PC to the G5 processor yet... so I have to run it on my G3 iBook 900. And Windows XP isn't so fast when you're emulating it on a CPU that could barely run it natively very well (if it were native to this architecture).
Good question: I'm not sure of the answer, but it could have something to do with the way I change it: I have to log on to the Account Management page and change my customer name. After a few days, whatever I entered in as my customer name starts showing up on people's phones as my caller name. It doesn't happen immediately, though. Strange indeed...
I use a small Voice over IP company for my home telephone service and I am able to change what my outgoing name says, but I cannot change the number that gets displayed. I'm not sure but it seems to me that this is pretty harmless and fun, because it always still shows my correct phone number. Right now, when I call people, it says "PRANK CALL" on the caller ID. Ha! .... well, I think it's funny anyways.
Well, that was in the news indeed and it's why I mentioned it, however it's important to note that while the official media spin is that we are debt free, in fact we are bound to paying down our debt until 2008, due to long-term financing agreements and obligations. In fact, the opposition parties attacked the provincial government's use of "accounting tricks" to make it appear as if we are debt-free so that Ralph Klein will be re-elected. The article you read in the news was simply a regurgitation of the official press release that was put out, and was not representative of the actual truth. Just like most news articles, I guess...
Not every place in Canada has a ridiculous sales tax on products and services. There is a PST (Provincial Sales Tax) in all provinces except Alberta, and there is a GST (General Sales Tax) of 7% that is across canada. The PST is set by the province and can range from nothing (like Alberta) to hovering around 10%. It gets added onto the GST, so if you're paying 8% PST and 7% GST you've got $1.15 CAD to to pay every $1 something is priced at.
Anyway, if you're shocked by high taxes in Canada, Alberta is the place to go - low taxes, the provincial government runs without a deficit and the alcoholic everyman redneck Premier (think Governor) runs the province like a business, and as a result we are nearly debt-free.
Here in Edmonton the cost of living is low, but IT jobs are hard to get unless you know someone or are willing to work low-level helpdesk jobs. I work as IT Manager for a local publishing and marketing company (which employs about 50 people) and am paid on the low scale of what someone in my position would make (I earn in the $30,000 - 40,000 CAD range). However, because the cost of living is low and taxes aren't too bad, I at 24 years old am a homeowner and enjoy a comfortable standard of living.
Some of my friends have done IT jobs that earn upwards from $40,000 - $60,000 but you need a combination of luck, determination, high skill and good connections to land that sort of salary doing IT here. If you're missing any single one of those traits (like I admittedly am) then you have to settle for what you get.
A lot of brilliant technology-oriented minds end up in shitty call centre jobs employed by Americans trying to save money by outsourcing to Canada, but it's a mixed blessing really. Those people would not be working in their field if it wasn't for those jobs, and they pay well enough that you can not feel live a welfare case.
I differ totally! The translation, my opinion is in, was absolutely perfect, and done for a really easy one sheet read!
So I take it you've never heard of the band...
Exactly... does this mean that if I had (for example) a vacuum cleaner company and I paid some studio to create a highly catchy jingle, and then paid for MASSIVE blanket advertising of my company in 30-second spots on all formats of radio across the US, that my jingle is eligible to be in the top 40 charts? It doesn't make any sense. Any paid advertising should not count as a "spin" since the radio station isn't playing what could be considered anything other than advertising, and advertisements aren't part of the assinine charting system. Seems like that logic, if enforced, would do a lot towards stifling this legalized Payola.
That's completely true.... I just got a G5 last weekend after owning my iPod for about 4 months. I convinced my boss to buy it for me (we are an all-mac company and I am the I.T. Manager) and traded him my old PC for it (who he is giving to his father-in-law).
All in all, the iPod i bought really made me salivate for a computer that matched its elegance, logical design and stable, worry-free performance. Bye bye, Windows-flavoured PC... (I love *NIX but I've never had the time or interest to spend days and days configuring my computer to do even simple tasks like recognize and use all of my hardware, thus I've just casually ran Windows at home for years).
She's better off waiting tables anyway - meeting that record weasel might have been the biggest mistake of her hypothetical life.
Not so simple. I get spam because my email address is listed on the WHOIS database online, for several domain names which I have registered. I know this because I listed my work email address for I am the IT contact at my job for my work's domain names, and they were fresh, new email addresses that I haven't used on any websites for anything yet, and the spam started coming within a week of my email addresses becoming visible/searchable via WHOIS.
I don't solicit marketing. Any other ideas how I could eliminate this spam?