My mom still has, and uses regularly, the GE mixer we got when my dad worked as an intern at GE in 1957 or 1958. It's older than me and it works perfectly (better than me). The only maintainance it's needed has been replacement of the cord, 20 years ago. Compare this to the two or three I've bought recently and had die, one of them the first time I used it.
Of a similar vintage is the Waring blender (3 speeds - off, low and high) that I now have. Works great if you don't mind the wonderful smell of ozone.
I think it's interesting that a large number of the posts here are talking about consumer items (telephones, washing machines, Hitachi Magic Wands) as opposed to high-tech electronics or more general tech. I guess I'm not the only one that grumps about how "they don't make *** like they used to."
A few months ago, I ran across the agreement my dad signed with The Phone Company back in 1975 or so. Not only did they own your phone, and charge you monthly usage fees, but, if you wanted to "install" any other equipment on the line (like, say, an answering machine), you had to a) have it approved by TPC and b) pay an additional monthly fee for it.
That's why the phone monopoly was wrong. As Lily Tomlin said "We're the phone company. We don't have to care."
Although I will agree, Westenr Electric/Bell System phones kicked ass all over The Crap You Get Today.
I'll grant you they were well made. They just seemed to die a lot. Like I said, this was probably due in large part to the fact that they were used daily by the General Student Population, and consequently power-cycled regularly (Done with Wordperfect? Reboot. Maybe you'll save your work first.) and left on all day.
The hardware *was* pretty much bulletproof, especially the keyboards (I spilled half a beer into one one night, when the machine was running, and just took it outside and drained and rinsed it. It was good as new in the morning.) and cases. I think we mainly had bad motherboard chips or flaky RAM. It was hard to tell because all you ever got for diagnostics was a set of beeps and a 4-digit number at POST if something failed.
Other than that, my only complaint was how hard it was to configure the BIOS and add new hardware without the magic disk. That and the fact the you had to plug the mouse in *before* powering on the machine or it wouldn't recognize it. And if the mouse ever came loose, you had to reboot.
Best damn keyboard I ever used, though. Even better than my Northgate Omnikey.
That reminds me of the best coincidence I ever ran across. At my first job, we were developing a desktop environment for DOS (file manager, various utilities, etc). This was in Southern California in 1990.
One of the project managers was testing the calculator and did something to get an overflow error. At that moment, the Whittier quake happened. The PM filed a bug report: "Arithmetic overflow in calculator causes earthquake." The bug stayed open until just before shipping, when it was closed as "Cannot reproduce."
I saw one of these smoke itself spontaneously through code.
When I was in college, we had a couple of labs full of PS/2 Model 50s (286-based). One night, a friend of mine was testing calling assemply language routines from Turbo Pascal. She must have gotten some parameter passing or something very wrong, because as soon as she ran the app, it crashed and smoke started pouring out of the top of the monitor. At the time, we all thought that was the most impressive damn thng we had ever seen - a program that crashes so badly that it kills the machine. That takes more than a 3-finger salute to fix. Today, I'm a little more doubtful of the exact cause. It could have been a flaky monitor, but it would be a BIG coincidence for it to have had nothing to do with the program. (I wanted to try running the program again on a different machine and see if it happened again, but that seemed like a bad idea.)
On the subject of crappy IBM hardware, the PS/2s were far way from five 9s. I wasn't impressed by their service, either. Out of 35 or so systems, there were always about 3 or 4 dead ones. The service rep would come by about once a week, open them up and fiddle around inside, and then leave with at least one still dead. Admittedly, they were in regular use by student goons, but these were supposed to be high-end professonal quality tools. We had less trouble with the Leading Edge 8086es in our old lab.
Oh, and don't even get me started on the Microchannel architecture and the proprietary IBM configuration floppy you had to use to add new hardware and tweak the BIOS. Feh.
I remember looking at that whole business once and going back to logfiles. Although, the message/resource file business *is* a lot more maintainable and internationalizable, and the process isn't all *that* bad. Let's just say it's overkill for 90% of things.
Windows - the Ada mindset of software development!
Damn, I remember being a Perl & Unix hacker, hot the fsck did I end up coding for Winblows XP???
That nice big paycheck at the end of the week helps mitigate the pain and guilt, I've found. Of course, "big" and "mitigate" are relative words.
Well, the point of the article is to point out that, while the exploit has been around forever, it's still around, in new, supposedly state-of-the-art code (latest Enlightenment, etc.) It would be really nice if people understood this and took steps to make sure they were safe. It would be really nice if terminal emulator authors fixed these problems, or at least worked around them (config option to recognize escape sequences other than colors, perhaps).
One point that stood out at me is how many apps are vulnerable because they started with an insecure codebase. This is how exploits become common - one buggy piece of code spreads to a dozen others and never gets fixed in any of them, if only because authors say "let's add our new features instead of validating these 25,000 lines of code we started with."
Windows? Well, windows don't even have syslogging like this -...
Actually, Windows *does* have a logging feature, but, in typical Microsoft overdesigned-anal-retentive fashion, it's a pain in the ass to use. Look at "Event Viewer" in the Administrative Tools sometime. I forget the API, but you (the programmer) need to fill out some complex structures and do something-or-other unintuitive to dump a message to the log. To actually see it, you need to go through a scrolling list of messages marked "Information" and doubleclick one to see the actual text.
I don't think anyone actually uses this, other than driver writers and those with the plugs in the backs of their heads.
Funny, I just did that and it worked fine (putty 0.52). Didja type it right?
The article did mention that Putty was not really susceptible to screen dump attacks, because
Although putty would place the title onto the command-line, we were not able to find a method of hiding the command, since neither the "invisible" character attribute nor the foreground color could be set. Putty has a relatively low limit to the number of characters that can be placed into the window title, so it is not possible to simply flood the screen with garbage and hope the command rolls past the current view.
This doesn't mean putty is "secure", but it's not as insecure as some others. The baddies seem to be eterm and rxvt. There's a nice description of a compromise scenario via eterm at the bottom of the article.
On the other hand, space is looking a lot nicer now - it's possible to wander around without having a sneezing fit all the time. Plus, you can get a nice cuppa when you go there.
Hopefully they can get to that big cloud of dog hair and all those old newspapers off in the back corner of the galaxy pretty soon. It really does look like a pigsty out there.
Man oh man, I agree completely. Maybe I'm just too sensitive, but loud computers bug the hell out of me. My main problem is with the CPU fans - that high pitched sound really goes up my spine. I just built a dual Athlon box, and I knew this was going to be a problem.
I went to QuietPC and got a power suppply, a pair of Zalman CNPS 5100-Cu CPU coolers, and some quiet case fans. I also replaced the Northbridge fan with a heatsink. I'm not a gamer, so I don't have a a fancy 3-D video card with a cooling fan, but they also sell heatsinks to replace those, too. The stuff is not OEM-cheap - it cost me about 200 bucks altogether - but I'm going to have this system for a long time, and I sit in front of it a lot, so this was worth it to me. The thing is so quiet I can hardly tell that it's on.
You may not want to invest that kind of money in something you only paid less than a grand for, but if you're pissed off every time you use the thing, it'll be worth it. It's a tool, right? And isn't it better to spend a few extra bucks and get something good that's not going to annoy the living shit out of you all the time? Look at it this way - you can take all of these parts and move them over to the next system you build. The CPU cooler is rated for AMDs over 1.73GHz, so it's not going to be obsolete anytime soon.
I've ordered several times from QuietPC and they just rock. Delivery is within a couple of days and customer service is good. You might think they're just a Zalman reseller, but they have a whole line of stuff - hard drive enclosures, acoustic insulation, yada yada, and their prices are reasonable. No, I'm not a shill, just a satisfied customer.
I just built a dual Athlon system with a MSI K7D Master L (MS-6501-030) board, and it's been working quite nicely for me. Admittedly, it's only been for a couple of weeks, but first impressions are "nice and solid". The original rev of this board had problems with the on-board USB, so MSI throws in a 4-port USB 2.0 card. The latest BIOS fixes the problem, but they still give you the card.
Regarding the original story subject, it has on-board Ethernet and sound, which is fine for my needs. Personally, I like the idea of having as much stuff as possible integrated, at least for non-critical applications. Less cards to fiddle with means less stuff to go wrong. I'm currently looking for a Mini-ITX sized system with video, two ethernet ports, IDE and pretty much nothing else built in. Everything seems to have USB and Firewire and be designed as a home audio server, and all I want is a faster, quieter firewall/Apache/mySQL/whatever box than my old P133.
No no no... If you're going to troll, do it right: You'd misspell "preferably", you wouldn't put the apostrophes in "world's" (twice), you certainly wouldn't get the "it's" usage right. I like the letter transpositions and the "WIndows", though - those were a nice touch. The lack of line breaks is excellent. But "cheep"? No, too obvious. You certainly shouldn't get the distinction between Unix and Linux.
Nice try, though. I give it a "B". Keep working at it - you have real troll potential.
Re:Create Your Own Thousand Island Dressing
on
Build Your Own Mac
·
· Score: 2
No, that's just Russian dressing. You need to add pickle relish to make it Thousand Island. Or is it the other way around? Mmm Mmm Good - white trash food!
Don't worry, you can turn all of them off. All I have is the commands (without icons), window tabs, address bar, and status bar. You can turn off the icons, move things to the top or bottom or turn them off altogether, whatever you like. Once you register, the ad at the top goes away and the whole thing takes up no more real estate than any other useful app.
I completely agree with you about the clutter. It's one of my biggest bitches about most modern software - everything is lousy with button bars, speedbars, coolbars, iconbars, minibars, whatever. The first thing I have to do after installing something is turn pretty much all of it off. KDE apps are particularly bad offenders here - the default layout of KWord gives me something like 8 lines of text. What really bugs me is that 80% of these buttons are useless. Does *anyone* ever use the toolbar icons for cut/paste/new file?
Just support the Open Nostalgia Project. All memories in Ogg Vorbis format, live and streaming. gnostalgia is in early beta, and I hear KMemories is koming ksoon.
I saw it while in Japan a few months ago, it's really not that great. Unless they've done ALOT of changing there are going to be lots of parts that only make sense after a native explains the Japanese folklore around them.
I'm going to have to disagree. You may not be able to fully understand it if you're not Japanese, but you can still get a lot out of it. The basic story is pretty clear - girl is trapped in a magical place by her parents' interference, loses them and is forced to work a demeaning job, is romantically involved with the estranged son of the queen, releases someone from a spell, they all go on a journey, everything comes out fine but ambiguous. She keeps trying to do right and making things worse, she nearly loses something very important to the queen, there's a lot of family conflict and intrigue. If you set it in the West, it would be right out of Grimm's Fairy Tales. Actually, I think it's more The Wizard of Oz than Alice in Wonderland.
Even if you can't understand any of the cultural references, you can still appreciate it for the story and for how well it's done. I knew this was a beautiful movie before I saw it, but I was still amazed. This is one of the best movies I've seen in the last couple of years. It's certainly one of the best looking animated movies since the classic Disney days.
Here's what I want to know: In the scenes with the many-armed guy who runs the furnace in the bathhouse, there are several shots of an ashtray full of butts, but you never see him smoke. Is it paranoid of me to imagine that Disney had those bits cut out, since smoking is so opposite to their image? It would probably only be a couple of frames. Has anyone here seen the original?
Well, that makes the whole key thing pretty fucking useless. Of course, it manages to fool lamers like me, so it's done its job, hasn't it?
I just did a test with Office 2000, trying to install CD set 1 with the key from CD set 2. Yup, it works. I don't know why I should be surprised. Oh well, at least now I know I can use both sets (one key had gone missing).
Actually, when you get a prebuilt box, it often comes this way. The Dell I just replaced has this. If you look at the Windows OEM CD, it says that the sticker has to be attached to the computer. Gotta make sure we can go through the office and easily see if everybody is in compliance, you know.
It's not like the key is going to work on another CD, after all. At least I imagine it's not. Can't say that I've ever tried it.
Yeah, I love this book. What I find most amazing about it is that it was originally written in Polish, and somehow all that poetry still comes out amazing. The one you quoted goes on for another 7 verses, and each damn one rhymes. Although that's probably a much of a tribute to the translator as is is to Lem himself.
I think my favorite story from that book is the one where Trurl creates the world's stupidest, most stubborn thinking machine that insists 2 + 2 = 7, and tries to kill Trurl when he won't agree that it's not 4.
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My mom still has, and uses regularly, the GE mixer we got when my dad worked as an intern at GE in 1957 or 1958. It's older than me and it works perfectly (better than me). The only maintainance it's needed has been replacement of the cord, 20 years ago. Compare this to the two or three I've bought recently and had die, one of them the first time I used it.
Of a similar vintage is the Waring blender (3 speeds - off, low and high) that I now have. Works great if you don't mind the wonderful smell of ozone.
I think it's interesting that a large number of the posts here are talking about consumer items (telephones, washing machines, Hitachi Magic Wands) as opposed to high-tech electronics or more general tech. I guess I'm not the only one that grumps about how "they don't make *** like they used to."
Remind me why the telephone monopoly was wrong
A few months ago, I ran across the agreement my dad signed with The Phone Company back in 1975 or so. Not only did they own your phone, and charge you monthly usage fees, but, if you wanted to "install" any other equipment on the line (like, say, an answering machine), you had to a) have it approved by TPC and b) pay an additional monthly fee for it.
That's why the phone monopoly was wrong. As Lily Tomlin said "We're the phone company. We don't have to care."
Although I will agree, Westenr Electric/Bell System phones kicked ass all over The Crap You Get Today.
I'll grant you they were well made. They just seemed to die a lot. Like I said, this was probably due in large part to the fact that they were used daily by the General Student Population, and consequently power-cycled regularly (Done with Wordperfect? Reboot. Maybe you'll save your work first.) and left on all day.
The hardware *was* pretty much bulletproof, especially the keyboards (I spilled half a beer into one one night, when the machine was running, and just took it outside and drained and rinsed it. It was good as new in the morning.) and cases. I think we mainly had bad motherboard chips or flaky RAM. It was hard to tell because all you ever got for diagnostics was a set of beeps and a 4-digit number at POST if something failed.
Other than that, my only complaint was how hard it was to configure the BIOS and add new hardware without the magic disk. That and the fact the you had to plug the mouse in *before* powering on the machine or it wouldn't recognize it. And if the mouse ever came loose, you had to reboot.
Best damn keyboard I ever used, though. Even better than my Northgate Omnikey.
That reminds me of the best coincidence I ever ran across. At my first job, we were developing a desktop environment for DOS (file manager, various utilities, etc). This was in Southern California in 1990.
One of the project managers was testing the calculator and did something to get an overflow error. At that moment, the Whittier quake happened. The PM filed a bug report: "Arithmetic overflow in calculator causes earthquake." The bug stayed open until just before shipping, when it was closed as "Cannot reproduce."
This was always my favorite tech support story. Oddly enough, the support guys where I used to work never laughed much at this one.
I saw one of these smoke itself spontaneously through code.
When I was in college, we had a couple of labs full of PS/2 Model 50s (286-based). One night, a friend of mine was testing calling assemply language routines from Turbo Pascal. She must have gotten some parameter passing or something very wrong, because as soon as she ran the app, it crashed and smoke started pouring out of the top of the monitor. At the time, we all thought that was the most impressive damn thng we had ever seen - a program that crashes so badly that it kills the machine. That takes more than a 3-finger salute to fix. Today, I'm a little more doubtful of the exact cause. It could have been a flaky monitor, but it would be a BIG coincidence for it to have had nothing to do with the program. (I wanted to try running the program again on a different machine and see if it happened again, but that seemed like a bad idea.)
On the subject of crappy IBM hardware, the PS/2s were far way from five 9s. I wasn't impressed by their service, either. Out of 35 or so systems, there were always about 3 or 4 dead ones. The service rep would come by about once a week, open them up and fiddle around inside, and then leave with at least one still dead. Admittedly, they were in regular use by student goons, but these were supposed to be high-end professonal quality tools. We had less trouble with the Leading Edge 8086es in our old lab.
Oh, and don't even get me started on the Microchannel architecture and the proprietary IBM configuration floppy you had to use to add new hardware and tweak the BIOS. Feh.
Oh god, that's right. It's all coming back...
I remember looking at that whole business once and going back to logfiles. Although, the message/resource file business *is* a lot more maintainable and internationalizable, and the process isn't all *that* bad. Let's just say it's overkill for 90% of things.
Windows - the Ada mindset of software development!
Damn, I remember being a Perl & Unix hacker, hot the fsck did I end up coding for Winblows XP???
That nice big paycheck at the end of the week helps mitigate the pain and guilt, I've found. Of course, "big" and "mitigate" are relative words.
You might need to set TERM to 'xterm'. I'm on w2k, btw, but I doubt it matters.
Putty is very cool, but I wish it's scrollback features were more -- robust.
One point that stood out at me is how many apps are vulnerable because they started with an insecure codebase. This is how exploits become common - one buggy piece of code spreads to a dozen others and never gets fixed in any of them, if only because authors say "let's add our new features instead of validating these 25,000 lines of code we started with."
Actually, Windows *does* have a logging feature, but, in typical Microsoft overdesigned-anal-retentive fashion, it's a pain in the ass to use. Look at "Event Viewer" in the Administrative Tools sometime. I forget the API, but you (the programmer) need to fill out some complex structures and do something-or-other unintuitive to dump a message to the log. To actually see it, you need to go through a scrolling list of messages marked "Information" and doubleclick one to see the actual text.
I don't think anyone actually uses this, other than driver writers and those with the plugs in the backs of their heads.
The article did mention that Putty was not really susceptible to screen dump attacks, because
Although putty would place the title onto the command-line, we were not able to find a method of hiding the command, since neither the "invisible" character attribute nor the foreground color could be set. Putty has a relatively low limit to the number of characters that can be placed into the window title, so it is not possible to simply flood the screen with garbage and hope the command rolls past the current view.
This doesn't mean putty is "secure", but it's not as insecure as some others. The baddies seem to be eterm and rxvt. There's a nice description of a compromise scenario via eterm at the bottom of the article.
On the other hand, space is looking a lot nicer now - it's possible to wander around without having a sneezing fit all the time. Plus, you can get a nice cuppa when you go there.
Hopefully they can get to that big cloud of dog hair and all those old newspapers off in the back corner of the galaxy pretty soon. It really does look like a pigsty out there.
I went to QuietPC and got a power suppply, a pair of Zalman CNPS 5100-Cu CPU coolers, and some quiet case fans. I also replaced the Northbridge fan with a heatsink. I'm not a gamer, so I don't have a a fancy 3-D video card with a cooling fan, but they also sell heatsinks to replace those, too. The stuff is not OEM-cheap - it cost me about 200 bucks altogether - but I'm going to have this system for a long time, and I sit in front of it a lot, so this was worth it to me. The thing is so quiet I can hardly tell that it's on.
You may not want to invest that kind of money in something you only paid less than a grand for, but if you're pissed off every time you use the thing, it'll be worth it. It's a tool, right? And isn't it better to spend a few extra bucks and get something good that's not going to annoy the living shit out of you all the time? Look at it this way - you can take all of these parts and move them over to the next system you build. The CPU cooler is rated for AMDs over 1.73GHz, so it's not going to be obsolete anytime soon.
I've ordered several times from QuietPC and they just rock. Delivery is within a couple of days and customer service is good. You might think they're just a Zalman reseller, but they have a whole line of stuff - hard drive enclosures, acoustic insulation, yada yada, and their prices are reasonable. No, I'm not a shill, just a satisfied customer.
God DAMN that's nasty. I'd forgotten I'd enabled popups. That hit me with 8 or 9 copies before I could hit escape.
What do they do - put newWindow(this) in the onLoad handler? (Note: preceeding was not necessarily valid, or even, reasonable, Javascript)
Regarding the original story subject, it has on-board Ethernet and sound, which is fine for my needs. Personally, I like the idea of having as much stuff as possible integrated, at least for non-critical applications. Less cards to fiddle with means less stuff to go wrong. I'm currently looking for a Mini-ITX sized system with video, two ethernet ports, IDE and pretty much nothing else built in. Everything seems to have USB and Firewire and be designed as a home audio server, and all I want is a faster, quieter firewall/Apache/mySQL/whatever box than my old P133.
No no no... If you're going to troll, do it right: You'd misspell "preferably", you wouldn't put the apostrophes in "world's" (twice), you certainly wouldn't get the "it's" usage right. I like the letter transpositions and the "WIndows", though - those were a nice touch. The lack of line breaks is excellent. But "cheep"? No, too obvious. You certainly shouldn't get the distinction between Unix and Linux.
Nice try, though. I give it a "B". Keep working at it - you have real troll potential.
No, that's just Russian dressing. You need to add pickle relish to make it Thousand Island. Or is it the other way around? Mmm Mmm Good - white trash food!
Don't worry, you can turn all of them off. All I have is the commands (without icons), window tabs, address bar, and status bar. You can turn off the icons, move things to the top or bottom or turn them off altogether, whatever you like. Once you register, the ad at the top goes away and the whole thing takes up no more real estate than any other useful app.
I completely agree with you about the clutter. It's one of my biggest bitches about most modern software - everything is lousy with button bars, speedbars, coolbars, iconbars, minibars, whatever. The first thing I have to do after installing something is turn pretty much all of it off. KDE apps are particularly bad offenders here - the default layout of KWord gives me something like 8 lines of text. What really bugs me is that 80% of these buttons are useless. Does *anyone* ever use the toolbar icons for cut/paste/new file?
It's a BETA, for crissake. Give them a break. Perhaps if you mention it to them nicely, they'll make sure it gets fixed.
Just support the Open Nostalgia Project. All memories in Ogg Vorbis format, live and streaming. gnostalgia is in early beta, and I hear KMemories is koming ksoon.
I'm going to have to disagree. You may not be able to fully understand it if you're not Japanese, but you can still get a lot out of it. The basic story is pretty clear - girl is trapped in a magical place by her parents' interference, loses them and is forced to work a demeaning job, is romantically involved with the estranged son of the queen, releases someone from a spell, they all go on a journey, everything comes out fine but ambiguous. She keeps trying to do right and making things worse, she nearly loses something very important to the queen, there's a lot of family conflict and intrigue. If you set it in the West, it would be right out of Grimm's Fairy Tales. Actually, I think it's more The Wizard of Oz than Alice in Wonderland.
Even if you can't understand any of the cultural references, you can still appreciate it for the story and for how well it's done. I knew this was a beautiful movie before I saw it, but I was still amazed. This is one of the best movies I've seen in the last couple of years. It's certainly one of the best looking animated movies since the classic Disney days.
Here's what I want to know: In the scenes with the many-armed guy who runs the furnace in the bathhouse, there are several shots of an ashtray full of butts, but you never see him smoke. Is it paranoid of me to imagine that Disney had those bits cut out, since smoking is so opposite to their image? It would probably only be a couple of frames. Has anyone here seen the original?
Well, that makes the whole key thing pretty fucking useless. Of course, it manages to fool lamers like me, so it's done its job, hasn't it?
I just did a test with Office 2000, trying to install CD set 1 with the key from CD set 2. Yup, it works. I don't know why I should be surprised. Oh well, at least now I know I can use both sets (one key had gone missing).
Actually, when you get a prebuilt box, it often comes this way. The Dell I just replaced has this. If you look at the Windows OEM CD, it says that the sticker has to be attached to the computer. Gotta make sure we can go through the office and easily see if everybody is in compliance, you know.
It's not like the key is going to work on another CD, after all. At least I imagine it's not. Can't say that I've ever tried it.
Aww, isn't that cute! At least they didn't get changed to "lose32-*".
MS-DOG - ahaha! What a riot. Those true believers, huh?
Yeah, I love this book. What I find most amazing about it is that it was originally written in Polish, and somehow all that poetry still comes out amazing. The one you quoted goes on for another 7 verses, and each damn one rhymes. Although that's probably a much of a tribute to the translator as is is to Lem himself.
I think my favorite story from that book is the one where Trurl creates the world's stupidest, most stubborn thinking machine that insists 2 + 2 = 7, and tries to kill Trurl when he won't agree that it's not 4.