Y'know, I have NO sympathy for you... "I'm lonely and shy, but I'm afraid the woman who likes me might not be young or pretty enough for me".
It sounds like you're not getting any because you are too busy looking at pr0n and looking at models to even notice when a worthwhile real-life woman comes your way. My first serious girlfriend was 15 years older than me (I was 21 at the time), and though we broke up, she is still one of the most amazing people I've ever met.
Just because a woman is 40 does NOT mean she is married or boring. I know plenty of single middle-aged women who are active as artists, writers, and musicians (everything from poetry to punk), travel a lot, are smart, witty, and funny, and REALLY REALLY good in bed. But you'd never notice, because, gee, you are too busy living in the whirlwind excitement of programming, playing computer games, and listening to cool music.
At the age of 28, I've historically never considered myself very successful at the whole sex/dating thing. Until recently, I considered it very difficult and frustrating finding people I could relate to.
Over the past couple of years, though, I've been much happier with my life in this regard. I have an amazingly sexy and brilliant grrlfriend and generally feel a lot better both about myself and about my attitude towards other people.
A couple of observations from my experience:
If you see yourself as a hacker/geek/freak, it is probably a waste of your time, for the most part, to look for potential dating partners in societally "normal" locations. Places where I have met interesting people worth dating include: art galleries, open mic nights, raves, punk clubs. SF conventions are notorious as geek meat markets, and for that reason, I don't espescially find them aesthetically appealing places to meet potential partners. Places that have NEVER worked for me include typical college parties, happy-hour type bars, and generally any societally typical "place to meet people".
Likewise, be honest with yourself about what you're looking for in a partner. Do you just want sex? A serious, long-term relationship? A fun person with whom you want to spend long weekends playing Quake and gettin' nasty? Just asking yourself the right questions can go a long way.
To reiterate what others here have said, there is no reason to be a computer professional and be working 60+ hour weeks unless that is really and truly what you WANT to be doing. I make a bit less money than many of my techie friends, but I still have a nice apartment, toys to play with, and a moderately comfortable lifestyle -- and I get to leave work every day at 5:30 on the dot, without feeling the least bit guilty about it.
Being obsessed with tech can make it hard to be as socially able as one might like. I've found it a useful strategy to look for ways to make your technical fetishism an asset rather than an obstacle. Make electronic music or artwork and carry around a bunch of CDs or stickers to hand out to people at clubs. Help set up a listserv or website for some local organization or group of people that you find interesting. Tech CAN be sexy if presented properly.
For me at least, I've found just getting a little older has been tremendously helpful in enabling me to meet people. My teens and early twenties were lots of fun, but were also filled with ridiculous amounts of angst and tension about my sexualty. Now that most of the nervous adolescent vibes have finally worn off, I have a much better sense of persepctive about myself and other people.
Relax. Learn to flirt. Learn to laugh at yourself, and remember that that cute grrl/boy that yer scopin' out is a person, just like you.
Enough self-help-sounding nonsense. Just go get some, you fucking dorks.
For those of you interested in the cinema verite / fake documentary aspect of "Blair Witch Project", I also recommend finding a copy of "Man Bites Dog". I haven't seen BWP yet, so I don't know how deep the similarities are, but "Man Bites Dog" is a wonderfully, darkly witty film that is thought provoking and lots of fun.
www.newgrounds.com - the site that has the cat augmentation info - has plenty of other amusing time-wasters as well. The Celebrity Assassin and "Beep Me Jesus" pages only begin to scratch the surface of the fun...:D
(also thanks to whoever posted the URL to the "Bastard Son of the Lord" page below - it's tremendous).
There is no such thing as a right to see a movie. Theater owners are well within THEIR rights to bar anyone they see fit from entering their place of business.
That's a good thing too. I'd hate to go somewhere and have to worry about whether the water fountain I was drinking out of had also been used by negroes.
Seriously, I agree that businesses should have certain rights as to who they want to do business with. Problem is, the new film restrictions deprive businesses of their right to make these choices, by legally mandating that they may not do business with a certain group of people (unaccompanied minors). The new laws step outside of the bounds of voluntary self-regulation by denying the theatres the right to do make their own decisions about how to do business.
Okay, I say "almost" because I have to realize that Katz is, first and foremost, a professional writer who has it in his best interest to generate a strong reaction. By the fact that this story has already generated 450+ comments, its pretty clear he succeeded.
But aside from his self-interest in playing the hype machine, I think both of Katz' articles are wonderfully inspired. As far as I'm concerned, the bottom line here is the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution - freedom of speech - and the fact that the new restrictions being attempted by movie theaters are a serious breach upon that freedom.
The Constitutional right to free speech also implies a right to hear, and nowhere in the Bill of Rights have I seen reference to an age limit.
Of course, other laws treat minors differently all the time - sometimes for the best, most often not - such as laws which "protect" children by requiring parental consent to use services like Planned Parenthood, never considering the possibility that an adolescent in an abusive/incestuous family might seek counselling.
But the question of the day is this - would I, a single male, age 28, participate in take-a-smart-kid-to-an-R-rated-movie-day? Almost certainly, provided I had the blessing of the child's parents. You see, I am a pretty firm believer in equal rights for minors, but unlike the nation's lawmakers, I don't have the conceit to pretend I know what's best for someone else's children. Similarly, I have enough of a self-preservation instinct to know that sneaking someone else's kid into an R movie against the parent's wishes could potentially result in fairly serious consequences for me. I do sincerely want the kid to see any movie of their choosing, but if they are smart enough to appreciate the movie, they're probably also smart enough to social engineer themselves a ticket without my intervention.
Instead of sneaking an adolescent into the movie, I would instead probably try to get them to read lots of intelligent subversive BOOKS, which, for the time being at least, aren't illegal for minors to partake in, though I don't have absolute faith that will continue to be the case. Depending on the kid's age and inclination, I might recommend anything from Lewis Carroll and Mark Twain to Kurt Vonnegut, Neil Stephenson, "The Catcher In The Rye", "The Chocolate War", Updike's "Rabbit, Run", John Fante's "Arturo Bandini" books ("The Road to Los Angeles" etc.), Karen Finley, the autobiography of Malcolm X, Abbie Hoffman, etc. (Other suggestions?)
While I was at it, I'd also probably make the kid copies of all my Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, and Public Enemy albums, because that would fill them with righteous vigor AND annoy their parents.
I have a definite respect for classic Commodore machines, but I was a member of the Atari camp from way back. My first computer was a TI-994A, but the Atari 800XL I got in the 8th grade was a much greater milestone... games like MULE, Jumpman, Shamus II, Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, Archon, David's Midnight Magic, Broadsides, countless Infocom games, Star Raiders, Aztec, Montezuma's Revenge, Eastern Front 1941, Ultima II, Gateway To Apshai, Donkey Kong, awww yeah...
I'll never forget the hours spent programming Atari BASIC, which, unlike the TI, had PEEK and POKE statements (word was Texas Instruments didn't include this because they didn't want people being able to hack their OS). Of course, Atari BASIC had its shortcomings like the lack of multi-dimensional string arrays (i.e. A$[10] pointed to the 10th character in A$, not the 10th subscript of a string array like in any other BASIC).
It's all about things like the following, which made me a true badass in the eyes of my 8th grade classmates:
10 GRAPHICS 4 20 PRINT "AtARI rUL3Z!!!!!!!" 30 FOR X=0 TO 255 40 POKE 709,X 50 POKE 710,255-X 60 NEXT X 70 GOTO 30
I hope I didn't get that wrong, but I'm sure any other old skool Atari people out there will understand what I'm trying to do...:D
If you weren't aware, you can also use the menu-driven dselect as a front-end for apt-get. dselect does a good job of managing the dependencies between packages, so if you choose to install ncurses-bin, it will also automatically select ncurses-base if you don't have it on your system already.
Debian may have a slightly more daunting initial install than Red Hat, but I vastly prefer dselect/apt to glint/rpm (even though glint does look nicer -- provided you are running X). I espescially like the fact that dselect gives you a current-to-the-minute list of packages on debian.org. With Red Hat, it always takes a bit of searching to find an rpm I'm looking for (or is there a way to point glint directly at a central rpm server that I don't know about?)
I saw the Stormix page a few days ago (ooh ahh an on-topic post!) and while I'm always happy to see anything that will bring new users to Linux, this particular distro just leaves me a bit lukewarm. As many have said about the new OpenLinux, all those gee-whiz pretty install screens just increase the chances of things not working right on old/unusual hardware. And do people really find plain old fdisk THAT hard to use?
The Wired article on the Yahoo/Geocities merger (there's a link to it in this Slashdot story) quoted a professor of intellectual property law, who theorizes that Yahoo is probably most interested in covering their own asses, and that it isn't their intent to hijack large amounts of intellectual property.
Still, reading those new terms of service made me nervous enough that I didn't want to take any chances of losing rights to intellectual property that I've worked hard on. I immediately tried to sign onto ftp.geocities.com to clean out my site, only to find that I was locked out of my ftp account, with a notice to visit the yahoo.geocities.com help page for all the latest info.
I arrive there to find that in order to access my geocities page, I was now required to create a Yahoo account for myself in addition to my existing Geocities account. In order to create a Yahoo account, I first had to agree to the terms of service that I found objectionable to begin with. No thank you!
After several minutes of further searching for a contact email address, I found one (support@geocities.com), and emailed them with a polite request to axe my account, explaining what I found objectionable.
Exactly how does one make the distinction? I have made numerous purchases involving the Internet, but in most case, the actual transaction involves the telephone or snail-mail.
Examples:
I find a for-pay web site that looks interesting, and in order to subscribe, there is an option to dial a 900 number which will give me an access code and charge my phone bill.
I've been known to order from amazon.com. While I place my order through their web interface, I still mail them payment via check or money order.
I use www.pricewatch.com to find the web page of a reseller who has good prices on hard drives. They have a great posted price, but I telephone to confirm they have the item in stock, and then snail-mail them my actual order along with a money order for payment.
#4 Widgets are notoriously difficult to find. I visit the Widget World web site, and email them for them to snail-mail me a printed catalog, from which I make my purchase via check/money order.
In each of these cases, the sale certainly involves the Internet, if only to make me aware of the existence of the company I'm doing business with. But in each case, the distinction becomes blurred as to whether it was really an "Internet sale", or merely standard mail order that took advantage of the net as an advertising medium.
Unless.gov is willing to tax all interstate transactions - period - there are simply too many exceptions and borderline cases to make this a sensible law.
ALL versions of Unix need to be regulated under the new Australian censorship act. I understand 'root' is a fairly common euphemism down under, for the act of intercourse. Unacceptable.
I'm sure I'm not the first to have made seedy comments to my friends about wanting to "get root" on some lovely woman or other...
/. light ru13z... but could we have an (HR) tag?
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Slashdot Tweaks
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Title says it all-- the new batch of changes are great, the page loads MUCH faster, even without "light" mode, but with "light" mode it's a real breeze (I use a graphical browser BTW). Only problem is that it's tough to see the seperation between comments/stories this way. Any chance of adding an (HR) tag between each comment and story?
I had a boss who had worked on some analog computers for NASA, who used them quite extensively for flight simulations up until the early 60's (and used them to some extent for other purposes even after that). Apparently the analog comps were ideal for flight simulators, which mostly consisted of changing a bunch of cockpit dials in response to user input. They eventually fell out of favor when NASA started experimenting with space flight, which was too complex for anything but a digital computer.
I'm not sure if my former boss ever worked on the flight sims or just on other applications, but he said the analog computers were pretty interesting, except for the fact that they were constantly going "out of tune" and needing calibration. He was full of good stories, though - he also tells about how he worked on a project which involved writing compilers in COBOL.:D
mostly a good reference for newer users...
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Unix in a Nutshell
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I have to add myself to the list of people who did indeed learn basic Unix mostly from this book. In 1993 or so, this was my first Unix book, and it made a nice replacement for the pages of hand-written crib notes I had been using to teach myself to use the various shell commands.
I tend to think of this book as "man pages lite" - if you have and know how to use the real thing, this book will probably just gather dust on your shelf, but if you don't have good man pages, or are new enough to be daunted by their presence, this book can be a good reference to flip through in search of commonly used bits of info. While there is no "reverse lookup" per se, the text is light enough that there's a lot to be learned just by casual browsing.
Of course, while this book will teach you Unix commands, it will do very little to teach you Unix - there's very little talk of things like the theories of pipes, job control, the architecture of the filesystem, etc. other than what can be gleaned from the relevant commands - but this isn't the same thing as a discussion of how and why things work.
Also, as others have mentioned, there *are* various flavors of this book (I think I've seen Linux in a Nutshell, Solaris in a Nutshell, and BSD in a Nutshell)...
I did enjoy Katz' "Hellmouth" articles, and think that "geek profiling" is a real and unsettling phenomenon, but I also think the VV article did a good job of putting things in perspective. Likewise, the Littleton tragedy saddens and concerns me, but perhaps not for the usual reasons.
It troubles me to all of a sudden hear impassioned cries of "Gun control! Gun control!" from people who never seemed to notice the HUNDREDS of kids who get shot every year in inner city schools and streets. Or people who can watch NATO's daily bombing of civilian targets in Kosovo such as hotels, condominiums, TV stations, and marketplaces, without being moved to cry "Bomb control!"
I graduated from high school about ten years ago, and for most of my Jr. High + High School career, I was one of the "weird kids" who got picked on pretty bad for being smart or having atypical interests. I'm pretty sure that I had it worse than most of the kids in my school, frequently getting jumped in the locker room, having my locker vandalized, and just generally being harassed.
Big freaking deal.
At my high school, kids brought guns to school, but it was primarily to show how cool they were. I NEVER seriously worried that one of those guns might end up being fired at me. I sometimes worried that some of the school bullies might show up at my house to jump me some afternoon. I NEVER worried that one of them would decide to do a drive-by on me because I had looked at him wrong.
When I was out riding around with my friends, we worried that cops might give us a hard time because we had long hair or dressed different. We NEVER worried that those cops might decide to have a little fun with us, Rodney King style. Hey, even if we looked funny, we WERE still primarily white and middle class. Other than the standard nuclear paranoia of the Reagen 80s, I never once seriously worried that my house might be bombed at night, or looted by soldiers, or that my parents might get dragged off by dudes with guns. There's plenty of places in the world at this very moment where those are very real fears.
So for those of you living in the Hellmouth - wake up - you are right now living a life which is the absolute envy of 99% of the world's population. The fact that you are sitting here reading Slashdot is a pretty sure indication that YOU'VE GOT THINGS PRETTY GOOD. Odds are, in 5-10 years, most of you will have decent jobs, a good group of friends, and a fairly peaceful, rewarding life. And for those of you still weeping over Littleton, take a good look at the world around you -- much worse happens each and every day, even if it doesn't make as good TV.
Whoops, you're right -- I had the version number wrong... it's actualy 2.0.33. Ran for 440 days before somebody rebooted it without telling me, I think because they were rearranging the server room again...
I vote for calling it "Intel/Microsoft/Linux"...
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GNU Inside?
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I vote for calling the OS "Intel/Microsoft/ Linux", because odds are that Linus never would have been able to develop those pre 1.0-kernels without the aid of Microsoft tools (like DOS fdisk) running on Intel hardware. The fact that it has evolved beyond that configuration is meaningless -- I argue that if it weren't for Intel and Microsoft, Linux would not exist in the form it does today. Give credit where credit is due.
Seriously, while RMS has always been one of my computing heroes, eccentricities and all, this whole GNU/Linux circus is just generating lots and lots of bad PR both in and outside of the free software movement.
The GNU Inside sticker is a good idea - I'd be the first to put one on every machine I use. I will even go so far as to ignore those parts of my imagination which would like to see a GNU Inside sticker featuring an illustration of RMS having yak dung shoved down his throat.
I'm mostly running 2.2.6 on the machines here at work, but still have at least one machine with 2.0.36, uptime 436 days (486/66, steady load 1.0 or higher). Yeah baby.
A new point release. Lo! Improved network drivers. Ever so stable.
'make menuconfig' Shows me myriad options Like springtime flowers.
Re:Why not make the M$ vs Linux (vs Unix) regular
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linux 2.2.9 Released
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Of course, the problem with this is it would allow people to make optimizations to look good for the benchmark in question. There was a well-known commercial compiler several years ago (can't remember its name) that contained several "optimizations" that would effectively detect when it was having a known benchmark run on it (a calculation of a large number of primes), and rather than actually doing the math, would simply produce the known total of the series as output. The company actually used this "statistic" in their advertising for some time, claiming they produced code that was n times smaller and faster than the competitors.
"Alice In Wonderland" (both books) is one of the best introductory texts on any subject whatsoever. As for GEB, I have to admit I've had a copy for several years and still haven't made a very sizeable dent in it. But I *have* read and enjoyed "Metamagical Themas", which may be a better point of introduction for the Hofstaeder newbie -- it's a collection of columns from Scientific American, and covers much of the same conceptual ground as GEB, in a more approachable bite-sized format (that does *not* imply anything is glossed over or dumbed down). I also highly recommend "Fluid Concepts...", edited by Hofstaeder, which is an *excellent* book on AI theory and concepts -- it gave me lots of great insight as to how pattern recognition systems are designed, using lots of interesting examples ranging from the extrapolation of mathematical sequences to linguistics to cryptography.
Slashdot Mirror
Nonsense. Just like a web browser, the Win2000 guest book is an integral part of the operating system.
Y'know, I have NO sympathy for you... "I'm lonely and shy, but I'm afraid the woman who likes me might not be young or pretty enough for me".
It sounds like you're not getting any because you are too busy looking at pr0n and looking at models to even notice when a worthwhile real-life woman comes your way. My first serious girlfriend was 15 years older than me (I was 21 at the time), and though we broke up, she is still one of the most amazing people I've ever met.
Just because a woman is 40 does NOT mean she is married or boring. I know plenty of single middle-aged women who are active as artists, writers, and musicians (everything from poetry to punk), travel a lot, are smart, witty, and funny, and REALLY REALLY good in bed. But you'd never notice, because, gee, you are too busy living in the whirlwind excitement of programming, playing computer games, and listening to cool music.
At the age of 28, I've historically never considered myself very successful at the whole sex/dating thing. Until recently, I considered it very difficult and frustrating finding people I could relate to.
Over the past couple of years, though, I've been much happier with my life in this regard. I have an amazingly sexy and brilliant grrlfriend and generally feel a lot better both about myself and about my attitude towards other people.
A couple of observations from my experience:
Enough self-help-sounding nonsense. Just go get some, you fucking dorks.
For those of you interested in the cinema verite / fake documentary aspect of "Blair Witch Project", I also recommend finding a copy of "Man Bites Dog". I haven't seen BWP yet, so I don't know how deep the similarities are, but "Man Bites Dog" is a wonderfully, darkly witty film that is thought provoking and lots of fun.
www.newgrounds.com - the site that has the cat augmentation info - has plenty of other amusing time-wasters as well. The Celebrity Assassin and "Beep Me Jesus" pages only begin to scratch the surface of the fun... :D
(also thanks to whoever posted the URL to the "Bastard Son of the Lord" page below - it's tremendous).
That's a good thing too. I'd hate to go somewhere and have to worry about whether the water fountain I was drinking out of had also been used by negroes.
Seriously, I agree that businesses should have certain rights as to who they want to do business with. Problem is, the new film restrictions deprive businesses of their right to make these choices, by legally mandating that they may not do business with a certain group of people (unaccompanied minors). The new laws step outside of the bounds of voluntary self-regulation by denying the theatres the right to do make their own decisions about how to do business.
Okay, I say "almost" because I have to realize that Katz is, first and foremost, a professional writer who has it in his best interest to generate a strong reaction. By the fact that this story has already generated 450+ comments, its pretty clear he succeeded.
But aside from his self-interest in playing the hype machine, I think both of Katz' articles are wonderfully inspired. As far as I'm concerned, the bottom line here is the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution - freedom of speech - and the fact that the new restrictions being attempted by movie theaters are a serious breach upon that freedom.
The Constitutional right to free speech also implies a right to hear, and nowhere in the Bill of Rights have I seen reference to an age limit.
Of course, other laws treat minors differently all the time - sometimes for the best, most often not - such as laws which "protect" children by requiring parental consent to use services like Planned Parenthood, never considering the possibility that an adolescent in an abusive/incestuous family might seek counselling.
But the question of the day is this - would I, a single male, age 28, participate in take-a-smart-kid-to-an-R-rated-movie-day? Almost certainly, provided I had the blessing of the child's parents. You see, I am a pretty firm believer in equal rights for minors, but unlike the nation's lawmakers, I don't have the conceit to pretend I know what's best for someone else's children. Similarly, I have enough of a self-preservation instinct to know that sneaking someone else's kid into an R movie against the parent's wishes could potentially result in fairly serious consequences for me. I do sincerely want the kid to see any movie of their choosing, but if they are smart enough to appreciate the movie, they're probably also smart enough to social engineer themselves a ticket without my intervention.
Instead of sneaking an adolescent into the movie, I would instead probably try to get them to read lots of intelligent subversive BOOKS, which, for the time being at least, aren't illegal for minors to partake in, though I don't have absolute faith that will continue to be the case. Depending on the kid's age and inclination, I might recommend anything from Lewis Carroll and Mark Twain to Kurt Vonnegut, Neil Stephenson, "The Catcher In The Rye", "The Chocolate War", Updike's "Rabbit, Run", John Fante's "Arturo Bandini" books ("The Road to Los Angeles" etc.), Karen Finley, the autobiography of Malcolm X, Abbie Hoffman, etc. (Other suggestions?)
While I was at it, I'd also probably make the kid copies of all my Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, and Public Enemy albums, because that would fill them with righteous vigor AND annoy their parents.
Lots of fun to be had at:
Blinkenlights Archaeological Institute: lots of really old (60s/70s and earlier) tech - I learned a lot.
Obsolete Computer Museum: Broken down by system - everything from the Sinclair ZX80 to the MicroVAX.
/plug
I have a definite respect for classic Commodore machines, but I was a member of the Atari camp from way back. My first computer was a TI-994A, but the Atari 800XL I got in the 8th grade was a much greater milestone... games like MULE, Jumpman, Shamus II, Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, Archon, David's Midnight Magic, Broadsides, countless Infocom games, Star Raiders, Aztec, Montezuma's Revenge, Eastern Front 1941, Ultima II, Gateway To Apshai, Donkey Kong, awww yeah...
I'll never forget the hours spent programming Atari BASIC, which, unlike the TI, had PEEK and POKE statements (word was Texas Instruments didn't include this because they didn't want people being able to hack their OS). Of course, Atari BASIC had its shortcomings like the lack of multi-dimensional string arrays (i.e. A$[10] pointed to the 10th character in A$, not the 10th subscript of a string array like in any other BASIC).
It's all about things like the following, which made me a true badass in the eyes of my 8th grade classmates:
10 GRAPHICS 4
20 PRINT "AtARI rUL3Z!!!!!!!"
30 FOR X=0 TO 255
40 POKE 709,X
50 POKE 710,255-X
60 NEXT X
70 GOTO 30
I hope I didn't get that wrong, but I'm sure any other old skool Atari people out there will understand what I'm trying to do... :D
If you weren't aware, you can also use the menu-driven dselect as a front-end for apt-get. dselect does a good job of managing the dependencies between packages, so if you choose to install ncurses-bin, it will also automatically select ncurses-base if you don't have it on your system already.
Debian may have a slightly more daunting initial install than Red Hat, but I vastly prefer dselect/apt to glint/rpm (even though glint does look nicer -- provided you are running X). I espescially like the fact that dselect gives you a current-to-the-minute list of packages on debian.org. With Red Hat, it always takes a bit of searching to find an rpm I'm looking for (or is there a way to point glint directly at a central rpm server that I don't know about?)
I saw the Stormix page a few days ago (ooh ahh an on-topic post!) and while I'm always happy to see anything that will bring new users to Linux, this particular distro just leaves me a bit lukewarm. As many have said about the new OpenLinux, all those gee-whiz pretty install screens just increase the chances of things not working right on old/unusual hardware. And do people really find plain old fdisk THAT hard to use?
The Wired article on the Yahoo/Geocities merger (there's a link to it in this Slashdot story) quoted a professor of intellectual property law, who theorizes that Yahoo is probably most interested in covering their own asses, and that it isn't their intent to hijack large amounts of intellectual property.
Still, reading those new terms of service made me nervous enough that I didn't want to take any chances of losing rights to intellectual property that I've worked hard on. I immediately tried to sign onto ftp.geocities.com to clean out my site, only to find that I was locked out of my ftp account, with a notice to visit the yahoo.geocities.com help page for all the latest info.
I arrive there to find that in order to access my geocities page, I was now required to create a Yahoo account for myself in addition to my existing Geocities account. In order to create a Yahoo account, I first had to agree to the terms of service that I found objectionable to begin with. No thank you!
After several minutes of further searching for a contact email address, I found one (support@geocities.com), and emailed them with a polite request to axe my account, explaining what I found objectionable.
Remember when the Internet used to not suck?
Exactly how does one make the distinction? I have made numerous purchases involving the Internet, but in most case, the actual transaction involves the telephone or snail-mail.
Examples:
In each of these cases, the sale certainly involves the Internet, if only to make me aware of the existence of the company I'm doing business with. But in each case, the distinction becomes blurred as to whether it was really an "Internet sale", or merely standard mail order that took advantage of the net as an advertising medium.
Unless .gov is willing to tax all interstate transactions - period - there are simply too many exceptions and borderline cases to make this a sensible law.
Just for the record, the release of the DOOM source code did bring a lot of benefits to fans of that game. These included:
So I think Eric had a good example, even if he didn't give enough detail...
ALL versions of Unix need to be regulated under the new Australian censorship act. I understand 'root' is a fairly common euphemism down under, for the act of intercourse. Unacceptable.
I'm sure I'm not the first to have made seedy comments to my friends about wanting to "get root" on some lovely woman or other...
Title says it all-- the new batch of changes are great, the page loads MUCH faster, even without "light" mode, but with "light" mode it's a real breeze (I use a graphical browser BTW). Only problem is that it's tough to see the seperation between comments/stories this way. Any chance of adding an (HR) tag between each comment and story?
Keep up the good work!
I had a boss who had worked on some analog computers for NASA, who used them quite extensively for flight simulations up until the early 60's (and used them to some extent for other purposes even after that). Apparently the analog comps were ideal for flight simulators, which mostly consisted of changing a bunch of cockpit dials in response to user input. They eventually fell out of favor when NASA started experimenting with space flight, which was too complex for anything but a digital computer.
I'm not sure if my former boss ever worked on the flight sims or just on other applications, but he said the analog computers were pretty interesting, except for the fact that they were constantly going "out of tune" and needing calibration. He was full of good stories, though - he also tells about how he worked on a project which involved writing compilers in COBOL. :D
I have to add myself to the list of people who did indeed learn basic Unix mostly from this book. In 1993 or so, this was my first Unix book, and it made a nice replacement for the pages of hand-written crib notes I had been using to teach myself to use the various shell commands.
I tend to think of this book as "man pages lite" - if you have and know how to use the real thing, this book will probably just gather dust on your shelf, but if you don't have good man pages, or are new enough to be daunted by their presence, this book can be a good reference to flip through in search of commonly used bits of info. While there is no "reverse lookup" per se, the text is light enough that there's a lot to be learned just by casual browsing.
Of course, while this book will teach you Unix commands, it will do very little to teach you Unix - there's very little talk of things like the theories of pipes, job control, the architecture of the filesystem, etc. other than what can be gleaned from the relevant commands - but this isn't the same thing as a discussion of how and why things work.
Also, as others have mentioned, there *are* various flavors of this book (I think I've seen Linux in a Nutshell, Solaris in a Nutshell, and BSD in a Nutshell)...
I did enjoy Katz' "Hellmouth" articles, and think that "geek profiling" is a real and unsettling phenomenon, but I also think the VV article did a good job of putting things in perspective. Likewise, the Littleton tragedy saddens and concerns me, but perhaps not for the usual reasons.
It troubles me to all of a sudden hear impassioned cries of "Gun control! Gun control!" from people who never seemed to notice the HUNDREDS of kids who get shot every year in inner city schools and streets. Or people who can watch NATO's daily bombing of civilian targets in Kosovo such as hotels, condominiums, TV stations, and marketplaces, without being moved to cry "Bomb control!"
I graduated from high school about ten years ago, and for most of my Jr. High + High School career, I was one of the "weird kids" who got picked on pretty bad for being smart or having atypical interests. I'm pretty sure that I had it worse than most of the kids in my school, frequently getting jumped in the locker room, having my locker vandalized, and just generally being harassed.
Big freaking deal.
At my high school, kids brought guns to school, but it was primarily to show how cool they were. I NEVER seriously worried that one of those guns might end up being fired at me. I sometimes worried that some of the school bullies might show up at my house to jump me some afternoon. I NEVER worried that one of them would decide to do a drive-by on me because I had looked at him wrong.
When I was out riding around with my friends, we worried that cops might give us a hard time because we had long hair or dressed different. We NEVER worried that those cops might decide to have a little fun with us, Rodney King style. Hey, even if we looked funny, we WERE still primarily white and middle class. Other than the standard nuclear paranoia of the Reagen 80s, I never once seriously worried that my house might be bombed at night, or looted by soldiers, or that my parents might get dragged off by dudes with guns. There's plenty of places in the world at this very moment where those are very real fears.
So for those of you living in the Hellmouth - wake up - you are right now living a life which is the absolute envy of 99% of the world's population. The fact that you are sitting here reading Slashdot is a pretty sure indication that YOU'VE GOT THINGS PRETTY GOOD. Odds are, in 5-10 years, most of you will have decent jobs, a good group of friends, and a fairly peaceful, rewarding life. And for those of you still weeping over Littleton, take a good look at the world around you -- much worse happens each and every day, even if it doesn't make as good TV.
Nena ("99 Red Balloons") and Jean Michel Jarre ("Oxygene"/"Miami Vice" theme) were also among the musicians speaking out against MP3.
Whoops, you're right -- I had the version number wrong... it's actualy 2.0.33. Ran for 440 days before somebody rebooted it without telling me, I think because they were rearranging the server room again...
I vote for calling the OS "Intel/Microsoft/ Linux", because odds are that Linus never would have been able to develop those pre 1.0-kernels without the aid of Microsoft tools (like DOS fdisk) running on Intel hardware. The fact that it has evolved beyond that configuration is meaningless -- I argue that if it weren't for Intel and Microsoft, Linux would not exist in the form it does today. Give credit where credit is due.
Seriously, while RMS has always been one of my computing heroes, eccentricities and all, this whole GNU/Linux circus is just generating lots and lots of bad PR both in and outside of the free software movement.
The GNU Inside sticker is a good idea - I'd be the first to put one on every machine I use. I will even go so far as to ignore those parts of my imagination which would like to see a GNU Inside sticker featuring an illustration of RMS having yak dung shoved down his throat.
-double_h
I'm mostly running 2.2.6 on the machines here at work, but still have at least one machine with 2.0.36, uptime 436 days (486/66, steady load 1.0 or higher). Yeah baby.
Lo! Improved network drivers.
Ever so stable.
'make menuconfig'
Shows me myriad options
Like springtime flowers.
Of course, the problem with this is it would allow people to make optimizations to look good for the benchmark in question. There was a well-known commercial compiler several years ago (can't remember its name) that contained several "optimizations" that would effectively detect when it was having a known benchmark run on it (a calculation of a large number of primes), and rather than actually doing the math, would simply produce the known total of the series as output. The company actually used this "statistic" in their advertising for some time, claiming they produced code that was n times smaller and faster than the competitors.
"Alice In Wonderland" (both books) is one of the best introductory texts on any subject whatsoever. As for GEB, I have to admit I've had a copy for several years and still haven't made a very sizeable dent in it. But I *have* read and enjoyed "Metamagical Themas", which may be a better point of introduction for the Hofstaeder newbie -- it's a collection of columns from Scientific American, and covers much of the same conceptual ground as GEB, in a more approachable bite-sized format (that does *not* imply anything is glossed over or dumbed down). I also highly recommend "Fluid Concepts...", edited by Hofstaeder, which is an *excellent* book on AI theory and concepts -- it gave me lots of great insight as to how pattern recognition systems are designed, using lots of interesting examples ranging from the extrapolation of mathematical sequences to linguistics to cryptography.