This proposes that the American Public is some sort of soveriegn quality unaffected and uninfluenced in its opinions by the policies that the elected "masters" and their CIA underlings support -- an assertion that is clearly not true.
Saying that the public can vote is not the same thing as saying that the public can think for itself. In point of fact, it can't. The public relies on information supplied to it by media, by historians, by talking heads, and by the government itself in order to make voting decisions.
If this information is in fact misleading, incomplete, inapplicable, or simply inaccurate without check (as can be the case in selective classification, or as we have seen from the Bush administration in relation to nearly every policy decision they've made), then the public's basis on which votes are made is flawed, and votes can be made to easily serve the master rather than the public.
1. Ban recruiters. 2. Mandatory listing of zip code where job is located. 3. Mandatory listing of salary range. 4. Mandatory listing of hire date. 5. Feedback system from job hunters responding to interview/employment experiences. 6. "Percentage of listings hired via this website" telling is whether *this* employer hires from *this* site routinely for its listed postings (and thus whether to waste our time applying to them).
Right now, things are far too tilted toward employers/recruiters and as a result, the job sites are virtually useless. As a job hunter, you can't tell whether a job meets your salary requirements, whether it meets your time frame requirements, or whether it is even within a hundred miles of where you live, much less whether the job is a real job or just a headhunter/school/scam posting. There's so much noise it's rarely worth the time to try and track down one of the very few and far between "good" listings.
The fact that you don't like the answer or feel that it's not "fair and balanced" doesn't automatically make it wrong. Life is not fair and balanced. Cause leads to effect. Every effect cannot have all causes, no matter what you have been told or how much you want to believe that there is no global warming, that we are bringing freedom to the Middle East, that Reagan and Nixon weren't crooks, or that we won't run out of oil. Americans are spoiled brats, conservative Americans doubly so.
Reality is not "fair and balanced."
"Non-hard-core gamers" aren't playing anymore
on
Mario All Grown Up?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
because gameplay is weak and games are intimidating and hard to use? It's true in my case. More to the point, previously "hardcore" gamers are, I think, being pushed into the "non-hardcore" camp.
Games are what brought me to the PC from Unix platforms in the late '80s and early '90s (well, games and Linux). I am the ideal market: male, 20s-30s, very technical, able and willing to assemble my own systems and very, shall we say, "intrigued" by ever-faster and sexier hardware.
For a long time before I started with PC games, I was a rabid text-based adventure and Nethack fan. But the graphics and variety of PC platform games were just too sexy to me and by the mid-to-late'90s, I was what I would consider to be a hardcore gamer: SMP, relentless video card upgrades, lots of RAM, RAID for faster level loads, CD changers to play multi-disc games more smoothly, 21" monitor, etc., moving into console platforms, buying just about every game that came out...
But it all tapered off somehow. Games would feel less engrossing, or the keyboard learning curve would be so high that I wouldn't play it after I'd bought it. At first, it was just one or two games that I wasn't bothering to complete, but by the time I had the latest 10 or 15 titles in my hands and a system that could play them all, yet I hadn't finished any of them and found myself preferring to do other things instead, I realized that this gaming thing was becoming a worse investment since I didn't seem to be enjoying it as much... and my game buying tapered off.
In retrospect, though I played a bunch of FPS games all the way through, the games that I find most memorable (and that I still own long after most of my game library has gone the eBay way) are the games that today's "hardcore" gamers ruthlessly mock. I still own Myst, Riven, Zork Nemesis, the Ultima series (including Ultima IX: Ascension), the King's Quest series (including Mask of Eternity), and so on. In short, they're primarily adventure-driven games whose interfaces and schemas are not so complex that one must spend two weeks in "learning curve" mode before actually having any fun.
I have some friends who still game all the latest titles, but I've tried them and they're just not that entertaining. There's nothing for the imagination there. You simply mindlessly flail about on your keyboard with ultra-complex controls while trying to blast things. Rather than being revealed to you through experience, evidence, and events (as was strongly the case with, for example, Myst or Riven), stories are simply told to you in annoying pages-long sessions of reading or long monologues by animated characters that I don't care about and that punctuate the otherwise mindless action.
In short, most games aren't fun anymore. The past is full of great games in dead genres. Text- or command-based adventure (i.e. Infocom games, early Sierra games), text-based RPG (Nethack, Rogue, et. al.), graphical adventure (Myst, Riven, Sanitarium, Obsidian, Grim Fandango, a million other amazing titles), action-adventure (Ultima IX: Ascention, Mask of Eternity, Nocturne), action platform/scroller (NOX, Gauntlet, Flashback), strategy (Civilization, Heroes of Might and Magic, Alpha Centauri).
I can't really think of any FPS, pure role-playing, racing, or sports computer games that are at the top of my list... Yet that's all that's on the market today. Compare to 1997, when the shelves were full of imaginative games in many genres. It's as though the improvement in graphics has pushed the "reality" paradigm to the forefront, leaving no room in the marketplace for "fantasy," which is really the only reason I ever played games to begin with. I want to go to other worlds that don't bear too big a resemblance to mine, and to enjoy myself while I'm there (i.e. it shouldn't feel like work).
Instead, today's games have a very high learning curve (trying to learn to play one of them feels like being in school, you can't just pick up as you go, and the controls demand full attention, not leisurely
Since nearly all modern drives remap bad sectors automagically unless they're in truly pitiful shape, I'd check my cabling, connectors, termination (depending on the storage hardware platform you're using). I/O errors are not the result of inappropriateness of a filesystem for a given task, they're the result of lost data long before your filesystem ever gets a chance to f*ck it up.
People keep saying "if they made fun of Jesus in Caroons, there would be no violence against Muslims in the street over here!"
But this is not a fair comparison--Christianity does not hold the same moral status here that Islam does there. But we have our sacred cows. Imagine what would happen here if the press across the Middle East ran any of these over and over, in increasing frequency despite our protests and objections:
- A series of cartoons showing black people being lynched, raped, and whipped, with the word "Niggers" appearing prominently in them in various ways
- A series of cartoons showing famous molested children like Jean-Benet being graphically fondled by prominent political figures like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
- A series of cartoons graphically and gleefully depicting the 9/11 disaster victims meeting their deaths in various amusing ways
You can bet that if these kept getting reprinted in the prominent Arab press, protests here would rise to violence, to riots, and to a general call by the citizenry to GO TO WAR WITH THE ENTIRE REGION, NOW. The streets would not be full of Americans congratulating Islam on its embracing of free speech if a cartoon with Bush's hand up a little girl's wa-wa or MLK hanging from a tree were being shown on the news every night.
That is what we have done to them: assault their sacred cow, make fun of their deepest moral conviction. Those cartoons have one possible effect: to offend someone. They are not clever, or original. They do not lend a new insight to anyone in the west. They're just designed to create outrage.
They've always been rock solid (not to mention easy to install) for me, across multiple GeForce generations. This is on Red Hat and multiple incarnations of Fedora with SMP systems. Many, many hours of gaming, with FSAA and all effects on. I think I may have had what appeared to be a graphics hang *once* in all the time I've used them (about three years).
No, you don't get it, it works NOW. My friend, in a management position at Intel corp., recently called me to bitch about Windows. I overnighted him a Fedora Core 4 DVD.
He called me the next day, ready to try it out, apprehensive as hell. I told him not to sweat it, that he didn't even need me on the line.
He booted from DVD, "Next-buttoned" everything from then on. It detected his 3D accelerator, his flatscreen monitor, his wireless network, and all of his hardware and dropped him in a nice desktop.
He plugged in his late-model Brother laser printer. Autodetected upon plugin and away he went, printing.
He plugged in his USB flash drive to test out access to office files. BOOM, icon appears on desktop. He double-clicks and up pops a file manager window showing his files.
He double clicks on an MS Word file and it opens in OpenOffice, no problem.
He plugs in his scanner and asks what program he needs to use to scan. I tell him to start GIMP and use the acquire tool, just like he would in Photoshop. The nice, user-friendly scanner dialog was just like he was used to in windows, and he scans three or four test scans and says "all good!"
He wants to use his Olympus digital camera. I tell him to go for it, so he plugs it into USB and BOOM, an icon appears on his desktop. He starts copying images off of it.
He normally copies his images to DVD-RAM, and he's got an external DVD-RAM drive that he made by installing a Panasonic LFD-211 in a USB case. I get a little nervous about this one, but he plugs it in to his USB hub, inserts a 4.7GB disk, and BOOM, there it is on his desktop.
He drags-drops the files from his digital camera to the DVD-RAM drive, prints out the photo he'd scanned with gimp, and tells me that he has one last need: he's got to install MS Office, Photoshop CS, and FrameMaker.
FrameMaker and Office, I tell him, are a go. Photoshop CS, not so fast. Does he need the whole suite? No? Then does he have Photoshop 7 onsite? Can he use that? Yes? Then we have a go. I point him to the Codeweavers website and he buys Crossover Office for the price of pizza and soda delivery, well under the cost of similar software for Mac OS.
After downloading it, he double-clicks on the Crossover Office icon on his desktop. Up pops a window asking for his password, and a moment later, it's installed itself.
I tell him to insert the Office XP CD and double-click on the "Setup" icon, just like he would in Windows. He does, and a few minutes later, he's got Office XP installed, including completed activation. He quickly does the same for FrameMaker 7 and Photoshop 7.
He begins to ask "how do I start these," and a moment later cuts himself off with, "oh never mind, they've gone into the start menu in a group called 'Windows Applications'."
He launches each one to test that it opens, saves, and prints files.
An hour and forty five minutes after he originally called, we've gone from nothing to a full Fedora desktop, complete with printer, scanner, digital camera, flash drive, DVD-RAM drive, and major Windows applications, and I haven't had to answer a SINGLE QUESTION and have instead been listening to him talk mostly about his family.
It's two weeks later, and I haven't had a SINGLE CALL from him asking for tech support help. His one comment, sent via e-mail:
"Man, I can't believe how fast Linux is. Starting about last year I was thinkin' this PC was due for a replacement request, but I guess it was just XP."
--
Linux is ready NOW. Five years ago, there were a few unmitigated optimists that refused to admit that Linux wasn't ready yet. Today, there are a few unmitigated cynics that refuse to admit that it became ready sometime in the last 24 months.
No matter how offensive something might be, no matter what they may have tried, nothing gives someone the right to resort to violence because they dislike what someone else said.
No, it doesn't, you're right. But it (violence) has always happened, and will always continue to happen, anyway. And thus, it always behooves you to pick your battles with an awareness of the consequences, whether the consequences have a "right" to exist or not.
In some cases, yes, it's justified to insult an entire religion or to make a few terrorists through "collateral" damage. But you'd better ask yourself each time: will this one be worth it? Am I gaining more than I'm losing with this action? Am I hurting other innocent parties with this action? If so, is it a tradeoff with which I can live?
So often the argument made is that somehow that by not actively causing collateral damage and making terrorists or by not actively succeeding in offending someone with your speech, you're instead supporting terrorists or destroying free speech. Let me tell you: I am not destroying free speech by sitting here right now without saying anything offensive. But if I say something so offensive that it creates mass unrest and states feel the need to regulate speech in order to preserve safety, then -- then I just might be destroying free speech.
Idealism's great... if your head is in the clouds but the rest of you lives in reality.
I've had the fortune to work both in photography and editorial, and I can honestly say that we did a cost-benefit for EVERY photo than ran across the desk, even those that WE (i.e. our staff) had taken.
The calculation is "how much does this earn us" and "how big is this story" vs. "what is the potential liability?"
We avoided any number of stories because we didn't think it was worth the liability. The ratio was probably 5:1 against, if not worse. We would do the mad fax thing to get permission for the representations in some photos if we needed to do so.
Years ago, there were two concepts, one being "public space" and the other being "fair use" that allowed the use of such photographs when newsworthy. But this is now a very, very problem issue and photo desk editors basically consider it from a risk-assessment perspective: "Are any of these people likely to sue us, or is the government likely to come and bother us about this photo? Because either one is certainly possible..."
If the story isn't BIG and there's recognizable property/design (government or otherwise) in it, and nobody will sign off on it, then forget it, it's not worth the trouble unless you're CBS and/or a superlarge market and have the equivalent of a major multinational's finances behind you.
Speaking as a freelance photographer, things are worse than people think. Not only can you not sell, but nobody will help you to publish such photos. It wasn't too many years ago that any photo except those that were truly "private" could be taken and used, if for nothing else than at least for documentary purposes.
Now, however, the list of things that nobody will buy and nobody will publish (printers even refuse to handle these if you try to self-publish books or similar works) includes:
- Any person (unless model contract is present, even if it's YOU!) - Any item (unless property contract is present, even if it's YOURS!) - Any building, patch of land, or piece of water (see previous item.) - Any manufactured item (because industrial design = intellectual property.)
So, a partial list of things that can't be photographed without a contract on file includes: all people, all property (if it's not owned by the government, it's private and needs a signed release; if it's owned by the government, it's too dangerous to shoot or use anyway), all places (nearly all land and half the water in the world is owned by individuals or nations), all manufactured items (because all of them had to be designed by someone, and such design is intellectual property -- even things like soap bars with logos washed off them or empty containers without labels), all logos, text, phrases on signs, etc. (because thanks to copyright law, any piece of writing created by anyone is copyright by them, even if only three or four words long and done in graffiti in a public place).
I think stock and editorial photographers are probably more aware than most of just how much intellectual property now affects our culture/society. Take a picture of a graffiti-covered shed in the middle of nowhere? You need a signed release from the shed manufacturer (for the industrial design), the owner of the land (for property release), and the graffiti "artist" (for text release). You basically need 2-3 signed contracts for EVERY PICTURE YOU TAKE, even of a ping-pong ball from the back floating in your own bathtub in the dark, because of all the intellectual and real property (and thus potential liability) involved in every photograph of everything.
Basically:
- Take a world in which ALL things are owned by SOMEBODY - and add intellectual property on top of physical property - and add a culture of litigation...and any representation of anything or anyone, anywhere, is subject to lawsuit unless you have their name, signature, and fingerprints signing off on it. No wonder the news media never gets into real issues anymore. The list of things they can't discuss/photograph without permission of "the owners" under penalty of endless lawsuits and liability is virtually endless. And thus, they're left photographing/describing those people that WANT to be publicized (i.e. endless human interest and movie-star footage and news).
Hehehe yeah, and there were some drives with the obscenely long lists, so long that they'd add another sticker and someone would pencil in six more.;-) And then when you ran your verify pass, you'd find ten of your own, swearing all the time at lost space!;-)
At one point I bought a drive that had like 12 bad sectors listed in the outer three cylinders, and out of laziness I just changed the drive parameters to one cylinder below that (just writing off the outer edge of the drive) because I didn't want to be bothered to have to map each one of them out by hand and it sounded like the outer edge was iffy anyway based on those numbers. But I got halfway through copying my data onto the new disk and decided I couldn't bear to lose that much space (it was only a couple hundred kilobytes as I recall, but still!) and so I stopped right in the middle, went back entered the right cylinder count, mapped out the list, reformatted, and started copying all over again with a few hundred more kilobytes in my pocket. It wasted four or five hours.
Oh man is this thread bringing it all back. Heh.;-)
Re:Scoffing Posts Are From Those With Sort/No Memo
on
Hard Drive Memory Lane
·
· Score: 1
Wow, that just brought back another memory... Each time you'd replace the clock generator, you had to do your timing loops--in the system block device manager, the system bus manager, etc. In essence, you'd have to get your drivers working with the new bus timings, otherwise they'd @#$(* up the data on your storage and wouldn't interact correctly (i.e. your serial port would be trying to talk to your 300bps modem at 308.4bps and such things and it just wouldn't work).
So you'd start up the OS patch tool that patched the OS *in memory* one byte at a time (like peeks and pokes in BASIC, almost). There was a big table of important bytes in the OS code that came with the operating system, so you'd do start the patch generator and tell it to change byte at memory location 4472 from 18 (ticks) to 20 (ticks) to set the timing delay and so on, through about six or seven different memory locations, each one a different timing loop. Then you'd cross your fingers and test all your devices to see if they worked without frying or corrupting anything. If not, it was back to the drawing board to try new sets of timing values. Sometimes when you tried to add a new device to the system bus (say, a serial port or some such), you'd spend all the rest of the day replacing the clock generator and then adjusting your timing loops, then trying to create a new operating system boot disk that incorporated those timing values instead of the old ones so that you could survive reboots.
Those were the days.;-)
Re:Scoffing Posts Are From Those With Sort/No Memo
on
Hard Drive Memory Lane
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Oh yeah, it was that slow. The machine was an old SSB machine and at the time you sort of had to get your own CPU and bus speeds working. It wasn't really overclocking, it was that the devices on your bus all had different characteristics or operating requirements and memory costs varied wildly depending on the speed of the chips you bought, so you often bought slow.
So depending on the rest of your kit, you might desolder the stock CPU clock generator/crystal and solder in a slightly slower or faster one. I think I had mine with a 2.8MHz crystal (divided into two, meaning ultimately a reasonably snappy 1.4MHz machine), and this was an 8-bit machine with an 8-bit bus that had shared address/data lines (they'd alternate across clock cycles), so the drive and controllers (in spite of having three controllers in series doing bus conversion) were really still much faster than the CPU, system bus, and memory, especially with the 48k of 400ns memory I had installed in the machine.
Hell, I could only do 1200 bps reliably on that system, which is one of the reasons I finally upgraded to a "new" PC in the mid-80s... I was seeking after that holy grail, 2400bps!
This is exactly what Crossover Office does, including parsing autorun.inf files.
Re:Scoffing Posts Are From Those With Sort/No Memo
on
Hard Drive Memory Lane
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
In the '80s I paid thousands for a 5MB hard drive that sounded like an airplane engine and required three controllers: the servo/logic board, an MFM-to-SASI adapter board (yes, these really existed, for RLL and ESDI and to and from SCSI too), and a SASI/SCSI-to-host-bus board.
I remember benchmarking the thing in excitement and getting a speed of 1 megabyte read in 96 seconds. A-W-E-S-O-M-E!
Later I replaced it with a 5MB SyQuest removable drive (yes, there was a time when SyQuest made 5.0MB removable disks that were 5.25" to a side by about 1" high) that had a window on the front and weatherstripping on the door to keep the dust out. Unfortunately, all of those disks eventually developed bad sectors (despite the weatherstripping!) and by the mid-'80s I was running my BBS on an ST-213 10MB half-height (what we'd now call "huge") MFM hard drive in a PC, having become fully commodified in my computing self.;-)
Speaking as someone who used to be a Wine-hater, Wine has definitely come a long way. My impression of Wine for years was that it a) was impossible to install and configure, b) didn't run anything other than solitaire, and c) caused major instability to desktops.
Then I tried Codeweavers' "Crossover Office," essentially a pre-configured Wine with graphical configuration and installation tools, and everything changed. I currently use all of the following under Fedora Core 4:
- Microsoft Office XP - Wordperfect 12 (word processor only) - Photoshop 6 - Framemaker 7
They all installed using the standard CD install, without my having to jump through any crazy hoops or type a single command, and they all run flawlessly and are great for serious work. They sit right in my KDE menu like all other applications and it's a real head-turner to be able to show up to work with my laptop running Linux and then pop into Word XP and Framemaker.
Wine works incredibly well after all, it's just more "raw material" than "finished product." Get someone to write a user-friendly front end for it (ala Codeweavers' Crossover Office) and it offers a very high level of Windows compatibility to Linux users.
They're opposites, you're right. Steve Jobs is by nature the person Bill Gates has been trying his entire career to be. Throughout modern computing history, Steve Jobs has consistently been involved with projects that were both visionary and innovative (Apple, Macintosh, NeXT, Pixar, etc.), often so innovative that they were unviable in the marketplace simply because no one quite knew what to do with them yet despite waves of "oohs" and "aahs."
Bill Gates, on the other hand, has never innovative, nor has his company innovative. While Steve Jobs' projects have always been light on their feet, leading edge, ahead of their time, and customer-oriented, Gates' projects have always been heavy-handed, borderline plagiarism, behind schedule, and very, very corporate-bureaucratic in nature.
You're quite right in your assessment that what Jobs has managed to do by merit (win a place for himself and his creations in history), Gates has done via ruthlessness, leverage, and mere financial brute force.
SCSI still tears the alternatives to shreds for price/performance at the heavy end of the load curve, no doubt about it.
If you doubt it, try both.
For going on twenty years it's been the same: those who haven't tried SCSI claim that there's no or little difference. Those who have used both SCSI and [MFM,RLL,IDE,ATA,SATA] in high-load environments hate to try to make due with anything but SCSI.
For performance and reliability reasons both, you want SCSI if you're dealing with high-random-access-load or high-throughput situations. ATA/SATA is fine if you're just offering up noncritical bulk network storage but for the rest you want the real deal, and you will notice the obvious difference if you try both in a stressed environment.
As a professional social scientist, let me address this notion of Marxist bias in the social sciences.
First, the course title you supplied, "Capitalism and the Environment" clearly implies a critique of capitalism as it relates to the environment, since market economies are the status quo in the developed world and their correlative relationship to the environmental status quo thus suggests itself as a course of study. Marxist and post-Marxist schools of thought form some of the most powerful critiques of capitalism and are thus par for the course in such a lecture. Yes, I suppose that the course could have been titled "Critiques of Capitalism and its Relationship to the Environment," but that is both less succinct and condescending to students who (one would assume) are bright enough to be studying sociology at university.
Did you or your significant other honestly expect such a class to be a bullet list of capitalism's successes, a parroting of the neoliberal party line? Criticism is the fundamental basis of academics, particularly in the social sciences. You are there to learn to think critically and to be exposed to viewpoints that challenge current assumptions--yours and everyone else's.
More to the point, conservatives tend to find Marxism everywhere. If it doesn't look, talk, and fly like Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, it must be Marxist. I've used Hannity a few times in my lectures and it's really quite amazing how often he labels neoliberal programs, supporters, or infrastructure as "socialist" or "Marxist" when in truth they are nothing of the sort, but merely slightly at variance with his own very narrow preferences for market economy and/or political economy parameters.
Finally, there is a difference between orthodox Marxist praxis (i.e. the project of promoting a society's transformation to a "Marxist" state, whatever that means--Marx would certainly not be pleased with such a formulation) and Marxist or post-Marxist critique of political economy. The former proposes a course of action founded in political and social deeds with the goal of a transformitive outcome. The latter simply proposes to use empirical evidence to discover and analyze what I will (in gross oversimplification) label to be "loci of injustice." It does not prescribe a particular course of action in such cases, but rather is one tool among many for identifying and contextualizing them.
The only time I ever got rooted, I was using dialup on a machine that I hadn't bothered to set up a packet filter (a.k.a. firewall) on because I had that same false sense of security that comes from being on a slow, temporary connection on a DHCP lease.
A rootkit was installed and the machine had to have an OS reinstall.
I'm a reasonably high volume seller on eBay and I've seen it happen several times, usually with camera or new computer equipment:
- Buyer claims not to have received item, despite someone having signed for it, threatens to leave negative feedback and chargeback via VISA/MC/PayPal
- I issue refund
- Buyer leaves no feedback whatsoever, positive or negative
- A week later, buyer is selling the precise item on eBay, sometimes even using the photos from my auction that they won in the first place (*grrrr*)
But that is at least less aggrivating than people who just buy and chargeback. There are a lot of those... they don't ever complain, don't ever mention that they didn't get something, they just charge it back with VISA/MC/PayPal and then I get to hear from the VISA/MC/PayPal directly that the buyer claims the never got it.
I can always provide proof of shipment and that someone signed for it, but usually VISA and MC at least just refund the buyer's cash anyway because they have a policy of working very hard to try to ensure that buyers are happy.
Slashdot Mirror
They're out killing Matthew Shepherd and blowing federal buildings in Oklahoma.
This proposes that the American Public is some sort of soveriegn quality unaffected and uninfluenced in its opinions by the policies that the elected "masters" and their CIA underlings support -- an assertion that is clearly not true.
Saying that the public can vote is not the same thing as saying that the public can think for itself. In point of fact, it can't. The public relies on information supplied to it by media, by historians, by talking heads, and by the government itself in order to make voting decisions.
If this information is in fact misleading, incomplete, inapplicable, or simply inaccurate without check (as can be the case in selective classification, or as we have seen from the Bush administration in relation to nearly every policy decision they've made), then the public's basis on which votes are made is flawed, and votes can be made to easily serve the master rather than the public.
Duh.
for the fact that "they" represent a larger portion of "the entire world" than we do.
1. Ban recruiters.
2. Mandatory listing of zip code where job is located.
3. Mandatory listing of salary range.
4. Mandatory listing of hire date.
5. Feedback system from job hunters responding to interview/employment experiences.
6. "Percentage of listings hired via this website" telling is whether *this* employer hires from *this* site routinely for its listed postings (and thus whether to waste our time applying to them).
Right now, things are far too tilted toward employers/recruiters and as a result, the job sites are virtually useless. As a job hunter, you can't tell whether a job meets your salary requirements, whether it meets your time frame requirements, or whether it is even within a hundred miles of where you live, much less whether the job is a real job or just a headhunter/school/scam posting. There's so much noise it's rarely worth the time to try and track down one of the very few and far between "good" listings.
Thinkpad LCD panels are notorious for color drift, usually toward green.
The fact that you don't like the answer or feel that it's not "fair and balanced" doesn't automatically make it wrong. Life is not fair and balanced. Cause leads to effect. Every effect cannot have all causes, no matter what you have been told or how much you want to believe that there is no global warming, that we are bringing freedom to the Middle East, that Reagan and Nixon weren't crooks, or that we won't run out of oil. Americans are spoiled brats, conservative Americans doubly so.
Reality is not "fair and balanced."
because gameplay is weak and games are intimidating and hard to use? It's true in my case. More to the point, previously "hardcore" gamers are, I think, being pushed into the "non-hardcore" camp.
Games are what brought me to the PC from Unix platforms in the late '80s and early '90s (well, games and Linux). I am the ideal market: male, 20s-30s, very technical, able and willing to assemble my own systems and very, shall we say, "intrigued" by ever-faster and sexier hardware.
For a long time before I started with PC games, I was a rabid text-based adventure and Nethack fan. But the graphics and variety of PC platform games were just too sexy to me and by the mid-to-late'90s, I was what I would consider to be a hardcore gamer: SMP, relentless video card upgrades, lots of RAM, RAID for faster level loads, CD changers to play multi-disc games more smoothly, 21" monitor, etc., moving into console platforms, buying just about every game that came out...
But it all tapered off somehow. Games would feel less engrossing, or the keyboard learning curve would be so high that I wouldn't play it after I'd bought it. At first, it was just one or two games that I wasn't bothering to complete, but by the time I had the latest 10 or 15 titles in my hands and a system that could play them all, yet I hadn't finished any of them and found myself preferring to do other things instead, I realized that this gaming thing was becoming a worse investment since I didn't seem to be enjoying it as much... and my game buying tapered off.
In retrospect, though I played a bunch of FPS games all the way through, the games that I find most memorable (and that I still own long after most of my game library has gone the eBay way) are the games that today's "hardcore" gamers ruthlessly mock. I still own Myst, Riven, Zork Nemesis, the Ultima series (including Ultima IX: Ascension), the King's Quest series (including Mask of Eternity), and so on. In short, they're primarily adventure-driven games whose interfaces and schemas are not so complex that one must spend two weeks in "learning curve" mode before actually having any fun.
I have some friends who still game all the latest titles, but I've tried them and they're just not that entertaining. There's nothing for the imagination there. You simply mindlessly flail about on your keyboard with ultra-complex controls while trying to blast things. Rather than being revealed to you through experience, evidence, and events (as was strongly the case with, for example, Myst or Riven), stories are simply told to you in annoying pages-long sessions of reading or long monologues by animated characters that I don't care about and that punctuate the otherwise mindless action.
In short, most games aren't fun anymore. The past is full of great games in dead genres. Text- or command-based adventure (i.e. Infocom games, early Sierra games), text-based RPG (Nethack, Rogue, et. al.), graphical adventure (Myst, Riven, Sanitarium, Obsidian, Grim Fandango, a million other amazing titles), action-adventure (Ultima IX: Ascention, Mask of Eternity, Nocturne), action platform/scroller (NOX, Gauntlet, Flashback), strategy (Civilization, Heroes of Might and Magic, Alpha Centauri).
I can't really think of any FPS, pure role-playing, racing, or sports computer games that are at the top of my list... Yet that's all that's on the market today. Compare to 1997, when the shelves were full of imaginative games in many genres. It's as though the improvement in graphics has pushed the "reality" paradigm to the forefront, leaving no room in the marketplace for "fantasy," which is really the only reason I ever played games to begin with. I want to go to other worlds that don't bear too big a resemblance to mine, and to enjoy myself while I'm there (i.e. it shouldn't feel like work).
Instead, today's games have a very high learning curve (trying to learn to play one of them feels like being in school, you can't just pick up as you go, and the controls demand full attention, not leisurely
Since nearly all modern drives remap bad sectors automagically unless they're in truly pitiful shape, I'd check my cabling, connectors, termination (depending on the storage hardware platform you're using). I/O errors are not the result of inappropriateness of a filesystem for a given task, they're the result of lost data long before your filesystem ever gets a chance to f*ck it up.
People keep saying "if they made fun of Jesus in Caroons, there would be no violence against Muslims in the street over here!"
But this is not a fair comparison--Christianity does not hold the same moral status here that Islam does there. But we have our sacred cows. Imagine what would happen here if the press across the Middle East ran any of these over and over, in increasing frequency despite our protests and objections:
- A series of cartoons showing black people being lynched, raped, and whipped, with the word "Niggers" appearing prominently in them in various ways
- A series of cartoons showing famous molested children like Jean-Benet being graphically fondled by prominent political figures like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
- A series of cartoons graphically and gleefully depicting the 9/11 disaster victims meeting their deaths in various amusing ways
You can bet that if these kept getting reprinted in the prominent Arab press, protests here would rise to violence, to riots, and to a general call by the citizenry to GO TO WAR WITH THE ENTIRE REGION, NOW. The streets would not be full of Americans congratulating Islam on its embracing of free speech if a cartoon with Bush's hand up a little girl's wa-wa or MLK hanging from a tree were being shown on the news every night.
That is what we have done to them: assault their sacred cow, make fun of their deepest moral conviction. Those cartoons have one possible effect: to offend someone. They are not clever, or original. They do not lend a new insight to anyone in the west. They're just designed to create outrage.
And that they have done.
They've always been rock solid (not to mention easy to install) for me, across multiple GeForce generations. This is on Red Hat and multiple incarnations of Fedora with SMP systems. Many, many hours of gaming, with FSAA and all effects on. I think I may have had what appeared to be a graphics hang *once* in all the time I've used them (about three years).
No, you don't get it, it works NOW. My friend, in a management position at Intel corp., recently called me to bitch about Windows. I overnighted him a Fedora Core 4 DVD.
He called me the next day, ready to try it out, apprehensive as hell. I told him not to sweat it, that he didn't even need me on the line.
He booted from DVD, "Next-buttoned" everything from then on. It detected his 3D accelerator, his flatscreen monitor, his wireless network, and all of his hardware and dropped him in a nice desktop.
He plugged in his late-model Brother laser printer. Autodetected upon plugin and away he went, printing.
He plugged in his USB flash drive to test out access to office files. BOOM, icon appears on desktop. He double-clicks and up pops a file manager window showing his files.
He double clicks on an MS Word file and it opens in OpenOffice, no problem.
He plugs in his scanner and asks what program he needs to use to scan. I tell him to start GIMP and use the acquire tool, just like he would in Photoshop. The nice, user-friendly scanner dialog was just like he was used to in windows, and he scans three or four test scans and says "all good!"
He wants to use his Olympus digital camera. I tell him to go for it, so he plugs it into USB and BOOM, an icon appears on his desktop. He starts copying images off of it.
He normally copies his images to DVD-RAM, and he's got an external DVD-RAM drive that he made by installing a Panasonic LFD-211 in a USB case. I get a little nervous about this one, but he plugs it in to his USB hub, inserts a 4.7GB disk, and BOOM, there it is on his desktop.
He drags-drops the files from his digital camera to the DVD-RAM drive, prints out the photo he'd scanned with gimp, and tells me that he has one last need: he's got to install MS Office, Photoshop CS, and FrameMaker.
FrameMaker and Office, I tell him, are a go. Photoshop CS, not so fast. Does he need the whole suite? No? Then does he have Photoshop 7 onsite? Can he use that? Yes? Then we have a go. I point him to the Codeweavers website and he buys Crossover Office for the price of pizza and soda delivery, well under the cost of similar software for Mac OS.
After downloading it, he double-clicks on the Crossover Office icon on his desktop. Up pops a window asking for his password, and a moment later, it's installed itself.
I tell him to insert the Office XP CD and double-click on the "Setup" icon, just like he would in Windows. He does, and a few minutes later, he's got Office XP installed, including completed activation. He quickly does the same for FrameMaker 7 and Photoshop 7.
He begins to ask "how do I start these," and a moment later cuts himself off with, "oh never mind, they've gone into the start menu in a group called 'Windows Applications'."
He launches each one to test that it opens, saves, and prints files.
An hour and forty five minutes after he originally called, we've gone from nothing to a full Fedora desktop, complete with printer, scanner, digital camera, flash drive, DVD-RAM drive, and major Windows applications, and I haven't had to answer a SINGLE QUESTION and have instead been listening to him talk mostly about his family.
It's two weeks later, and I haven't had a SINGLE CALL from him asking for tech support help. His one comment, sent via e-mail:
"Man, I can't believe how fast Linux is. Starting about last year I was thinkin' this PC was due for a replacement request, but I guess it was just XP."
--
Linux is ready NOW. Five years ago, there were a few unmitigated optimists that refused to admit that Linux wasn't ready yet. Today, there are a few unmitigated cynics that refuse to admit that it became ready sometime in the last 24 months.
No matter how offensive something might be, no matter what they may have tried, nothing gives someone the right to resort to violence because they dislike what someone else said.
No, it doesn't, you're right. But it (violence) has always happened, and will always continue to happen, anyway. And thus, it always behooves you to pick your battles with an awareness of the consequences, whether the consequences have a "right" to exist or not.
In some cases, yes, it's justified to insult an entire religion or to make a few terrorists through "collateral" damage. But you'd better ask yourself each time: will this one be worth it? Am I gaining more than I'm losing with this action? Am I hurting other innocent parties with this action? If so, is it a tradeoff with which I can live?
So often the argument made is that somehow that by not actively causing collateral damage and making terrorists or by not actively succeeding in offending someone with your speech, you're instead supporting terrorists or destroying free speech. Let me tell you: I am not destroying free speech by sitting here right now without saying anything offensive. But if I say something so offensive that it creates mass unrest and states feel the need to regulate speech in order to preserve safety, then -- then I just might be destroying free speech.
Idealism's great... if your head is in the clouds but the rest of you lives in reality.
I've had the fortune to work both in photography and editorial, and I can honestly say that we did a cost-benefit for EVERY photo than ran across the desk, even those that WE (i.e. our staff) had taken.
The calculation is "how much does this earn us" and "how big is this story" vs. "what is the potential liability?"
We avoided any number of stories because we didn't think it was worth the liability. The ratio was probably 5:1 against, if not worse. We would do the mad fax thing to get permission for the representations in some photos if we needed to do so.
Years ago, there were two concepts, one being "public space" and the other being "fair use" that allowed the use of such photographs when newsworthy. But this is now a very, very problem issue and photo desk editors basically consider it from a risk-assessment perspective: "Are any of these people likely to sue us, or is the government likely to come and bother us about this photo? Because either one is certainly possible..."
If the story isn't BIG and there's recognizable property/design (government or otherwise) in it, and nobody will sign off on it, then forget it, it's not worth the trouble unless you're CBS and/or a superlarge market and have the equivalent of a major multinational's finances behind you.
Speaking as a freelance photographer, things are worse than people think. Not only can you not sell, but nobody will help you to publish such photos. It wasn't too many years ago that any photo except those that were truly "private" could be taken and used, if for nothing else than at least for documentary purposes.
...and any representation of anything or anyone, anywhere, is subject to lawsuit unless you have their name, signature, and fingerprints signing off on it. No wonder the news media never gets into real issues anymore. The list of things they can't discuss/photograph without permission of "the owners" under penalty of endless lawsuits and liability is virtually endless. And thus, they're left photographing/describing those people that WANT to be publicized (i.e. endless human interest and movie-star footage and news).
Now, however, the list of things that nobody will buy and nobody will publish (printers even refuse to handle these if you try to self-publish books or similar works) includes:
- Any person (unless model contract is present, even if it's YOU!)
- Any item (unless property contract is present, even if it's YOURS!)
- Any building, patch of land, or piece of water (see previous item.)
- Any manufactured item (because industrial design = intellectual property.)
So, a partial list of things that can't be photographed without a contract on file includes: all people, all property (if it's not owned by the government, it's private and needs a signed release; if it's owned by the government, it's too dangerous to shoot or use anyway), all places (nearly all land and half the water in the world is owned by individuals or nations), all manufactured items (because all of them had to be designed by someone, and such design is intellectual property -- even things like soap bars with logos washed off them or empty containers without labels), all logos, text, phrases on signs, etc. (because thanks to copyright law, any piece of writing created by anyone is copyright by them, even if only three or four words long and done in graffiti in a public place).
I think stock and editorial photographers are probably more aware than most of just how much intellectual property now affects our culture/society. Take a picture of a graffiti-covered shed in the middle of nowhere? You need a signed release from the shed manufacturer (for the industrial design), the owner of the land (for property release), and the graffiti "artist" (for text release). You basically need 2-3 signed contracts for EVERY PICTURE YOU TAKE, even of a ping-pong ball from the back floating in your own bathtub in the dark, because of all the intellectual and real property (and thus potential liability) involved in every photograph of everything.
Basically:
- Take a world in which ALL things are owned by SOMEBODY
- and add intellectual property on top of physical property
- and add a culture of litigation
Hehehe yeah, and there were some drives with the obscenely long lists, so long that they'd add another sticker and someone would pencil in six more. ;-) And then when you ran your verify pass, you'd find ten of your own, swearing all the time at lost space! ;-)
;-)
At one point I bought a drive that had like 12 bad sectors listed in the outer three cylinders, and out of laziness I just changed the drive parameters to one cylinder below that (just writing off the outer edge of the drive) because I didn't want to be bothered to have to map each one of them out by hand and it sounded like the outer edge was iffy anyway based on those numbers. But I got halfway through copying my data onto the new disk and decided I couldn't bear to lose that much space (it was only a couple hundred kilobytes as I recall, but still!) and so I stopped right in the middle, went back entered the right cylinder count, mapped out the list, reformatted, and started copying all over again with a few hundred more kilobytes in my pocket. It wasted four or five hours.
Oh man is this thread bringing it all back. Heh.
Wow, that just brought back another memory... Each time you'd replace the clock generator, you had to do your timing loops--in the system block device manager, the system bus manager, etc. In essence, you'd have to get your drivers working with the new bus timings, otherwise they'd @#$(* up the data on your storage and wouldn't interact correctly (i.e. your serial port would be trying to talk to your 300bps modem at 308.4bps and such things and it just wouldn't work).
;-)
So you'd start up the OS patch tool that patched the OS *in memory* one byte at a time (like peeks and pokes in BASIC, almost). There was a big table of important bytes in the OS code that came with the operating system, so you'd do start the patch generator and tell it to change byte at memory location 4472 from 18 (ticks) to 20 (ticks) to set the timing delay and so on, through about six or seven different memory locations, each one a different timing loop. Then you'd cross your fingers and test all your devices to see if they worked without frying or corrupting anything. If not, it was back to the drawing board to try new sets of timing values. Sometimes when you tried to add a new device to the system bus (say, a serial port or some such), you'd spend all the rest of the day replacing the clock generator and then adjusting your timing loops, then trying to create a new operating system boot disk that incorporated those timing values instead of the old ones so that you could survive reboots.
Those were the days.
Oh yeah, it was that slow. The machine was an old SSB machine and at the time you sort of had to get your own CPU and bus speeds working. It wasn't really overclocking, it was that the devices on your bus all had different characteristics or operating requirements and memory costs varied wildly depending on the speed of the chips you bought, so you often bought slow.
So depending on the rest of your kit, you might desolder the stock CPU clock generator/crystal and solder in a slightly slower or faster one. I think I had mine with a 2.8MHz crystal (divided into two, meaning ultimately a reasonably snappy 1.4MHz machine), and this was an 8-bit machine with an 8-bit bus that had shared address/data lines (they'd alternate across clock cycles), so the drive and controllers (in spite of having three controllers in series doing bus conversion) were really still much faster than the CPU, system bus, and memory, especially with the 48k of 400ns memory I had installed in the machine.
Hell, I could only do 1200 bps reliably on that system, which is one of the reasons I finally upgraded to a "new" PC in the mid-80s... I was seeking after that holy grail, 2400bps!
This is exactly what Crossover Office does, including parsing autorun.inf files.
In the '80s I paid thousands for a 5MB hard drive that sounded like an airplane engine and required three controllers: the servo/logic board, an MFM-to-SASI adapter board (yes, these really existed, for RLL and ESDI and to and from SCSI too), and a SASI/SCSI-to-host-bus board.
;-)
I remember benchmarking the thing in excitement and getting a speed of 1 megabyte read in 96 seconds. A-W-E-S-O-M-E!
Later I replaced it with a 5MB SyQuest removable drive (yes, there was a time when SyQuest made 5.0MB removable disks that were 5.25" to a side by about 1" high) that had a window on the front and weatherstripping on the door to keep the dust out. Unfortunately, all of those disks eventually developed bad sectors (despite the weatherstripping!) and by the mid-'80s I was running my BBS on an ST-213 10MB half-height (what we'd now call "huge") MFM hard drive in a PC, having become fully commodified in my computing self.
Speaking as someone who used to be a Wine-hater, Wine has definitely come a long way. My impression of Wine for years was that it a) was impossible to install and configure, b) didn't run anything other than solitaire, and c) caused major instability to desktops.
Then I tried Codeweavers' "Crossover Office," essentially a pre-configured Wine with graphical configuration and installation tools, and everything changed. I currently use all of the following under Fedora Core 4:
- Microsoft Office XP
- Wordperfect 12 (word processor only)
- Photoshop 6
- Framemaker 7
They all installed using the standard CD install, without my having to jump through any crazy hoops or type a single command, and they all run flawlessly and are great for serious work. They sit right in my KDE menu like all other applications and it's a real head-turner to be able to show up to work with my laptop running Linux and then pop into Word XP and Framemaker.
Wine works incredibly well after all, it's just more "raw material" than "finished product." Get someone to write a user-friendly front end for it (ala Codeweavers' Crossover Office) and it offers a very high level of Windows compatibility to Linux users.
They're opposites, you're right. Steve Jobs is by nature the person Bill Gates has been trying his entire career to be. Throughout modern computing history, Steve Jobs has consistently been involved with projects that were both visionary and innovative (Apple, Macintosh, NeXT, Pixar, etc.), often so innovative that they were unviable in the marketplace simply because no one quite knew what to do with them yet despite waves of "oohs" and "aahs."
Bill Gates, on the other hand, has never innovative, nor has his company innovative. While Steve Jobs' projects have always been light on their feet, leading edge, ahead of their time, and customer-oriented, Gates' projects have always been heavy-handed, borderline plagiarism, behind schedule, and very, very corporate-bureaucratic in nature.
You're quite right in your assessment that what Jobs has managed to do by merit (win a place for himself and his creations in history), Gates has done via ruthlessness, leverage, and mere financial brute force.
SCSI still tears the alternatives to shreds for price/performance at the heavy end of the load curve, no doubt about it.
If you doubt it, try both.
For going on twenty years it's been the same: those who haven't tried SCSI claim that there's no or little difference. Those who have used both SCSI and [MFM,RLL,IDE,ATA,SATA] in high-load environments hate to try to make due with anything but SCSI.
For performance and reliability reasons both, you want SCSI if you're dealing with high-random-access-load or high-throughput situations. ATA/SATA is fine if you're just offering up noncritical bulk network storage but for the rest you want the real deal, and you will notice the obvious difference if you try both in a stressed environment.
As a professional social scientist, let me address this notion of Marxist bias in the social sciences.
First, the course title you supplied, "Capitalism and the Environment" clearly implies a critique of capitalism as it relates to the environment, since market economies are the status quo in the developed world and their correlative relationship to the environmental status quo thus suggests itself as a course of study. Marxist and post-Marxist schools of thought form some of the most powerful critiques of capitalism and are thus par for the course in such a lecture. Yes, I suppose that the course could have been titled "Critiques of Capitalism and its Relationship to the Environment," but that is both less succinct and condescending to students who (one would assume) are bright enough to be studying sociology at university.
Did you or your significant other honestly expect such a class to be a bullet list of capitalism's successes, a parroting of the neoliberal party line? Criticism is the fundamental basis of academics, particularly in the social sciences. You are there to learn to think critically and to be exposed to viewpoints that challenge current assumptions--yours and everyone else's.
More to the point, conservatives tend to find Marxism everywhere. If it doesn't look, talk, and fly like Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, it must be Marxist. I've used Hannity a few times in my lectures and it's really quite amazing how often he labels neoliberal programs, supporters, or infrastructure as "socialist" or "Marxist" when in truth they are nothing of the sort, but merely slightly at variance with his own very narrow preferences for market economy and/or political economy parameters.
Finally, there is a difference between orthodox Marxist praxis (i.e. the project of promoting a society's transformation to a "Marxist" state, whatever that means--Marx would certainly not be pleased with such a formulation) and Marxist or post-Marxist critique of political economy. The former proposes a course of action founded in political and social deeds with the goal of a transformitive outcome. The latter simply proposes to use empirical evidence to discover and analyze what I will (in gross oversimplification) label to be "loci of injustice." It does not prescribe a particular course of action in such cases, but rather is one tool among many for identifying and contextualizing them.
The only time I ever got rooted, I was using dialup on a machine that I hadn't bothered to set up a packet filter (a.k.a. firewall) on because I had that same false sense of security that comes from being on a slow, temporary connection on a DHCP lease.
A rootkit was installed and the machine had to have an OS reinstall.
I'm a reasonably high volume seller on eBay and I've seen it happen several times, usually with camera or new computer equipment:
- Buyer claims not to have received item, despite someone having signed for it, threatens to leave negative feedback and chargeback via VISA/MC/PayPal
- I issue refund
- Buyer leaves no feedback whatsoever, positive or negative
- A week later, buyer is selling the precise item on eBay, sometimes even using the photos from my auction that they won in the first place (*grrrr*)
But that is at least less aggrivating than people who just buy and chargeback. There are a lot of those... they don't ever complain, don't ever mention that they didn't get something, they just charge it back with VISA/MC/PayPal and then I get to hear from the VISA/MC/PayPal directly that the buyer claims the never got it.
I can always provide proof of shipment and that someone signed for it, but usually VISA and MC at least just refund the buyer's cash anyway because they have a policy of working very hard to try to ensure that buyers are happy.
-