Unfortunately, you can't play on Battle.Net with a cracked DII binary - the servers check the game version somehow and refuses to talk to modified binaries.
More important is writing good code in the first place. I've seen both really good code and really awful spaghetti code. Really good code is so clear and understandable that it almost doesn't need documentation, while no amount of documentation could possibly improve badly written code. I've also seen decent code that has been polluted by useless comments such as:
x++;// add 1 to x
Even if it was possible to impose a set of style guidelines on the Open Source community, I wouldn't want to. Good code, and good documentation in the code is a fine art. A few hints can be found in various code style guides, but the only way to learn to write good code and comments is to read good and bad examples of other people's code, and to practice.
Granted, this isn't platform independent, but I've found that I've learned more about Linux and Unix by playing with the system, rather than reading books. You might want to consider handing out Linux CDs so people who want to can install them and play with them.
Aside from that, a really good book that is largely platform neutral is Unix Power Tools. It is a huge collection of tips and tricks that demonstrate the true power of Unix.
Manufacturers have very low yields when making TFT active matrix LCD displays. Most plants have a "glass mountain" of discarded defective LCD displays, so the end result is high prices and pixel defects.
I'm waiting for newer, cheaper technologies, such as the light-emitting-polymer displays which can be made by printing the polymers onto the display with a special inkjet printer.
One of the more intriguing options I've seen is hot-desking. The concept sounds... different. With no desk of your own, or space of your own, you are expected to just work wherever you want with a laptop and mobile phone. Although a lot of people find it liberating (especially in media companys), I think for geeks, it would actually be quite constraining - you can't have your manuals nearby.
This is straight out of Dilbert - the PHB decides to use this scheme. He describes it as being modeled after public bathroom stalls, but calls it "hotelling" because it increases the chances he'll get tips. Before long, Wally takes up the fine art of graffiti to give himself a sense of home again. Scott Adams claims hotelling sends the message to workers that they're one foot out the door at all times.
Re:Useful for trauma, not for illness
on
Blood Type: NULL
·
· Score: 1
This stuff could be combined with blood plasma. Blood plasma is more readily available than whole blood, since donors have to wait 8 weeks to donate again after they've donated whole blood, but they only have to wait 3 days if they only give plasma.
NTSC (the standard signal for American TVs) has 525 lines of resolution, but only 480 lines of visible picture. The remainder is taken up in the vertical blank interval. The signal is interlaced, so the odd scanlines are displayed on one frame, the even scanlines on the next frame. As far as horizontal resolution, there isn't a real pixel value since the signal is analog.
However, I remember some facts from when I used my Atari 400 computer. It had a maximum resolution of 320x192 pixels in graphics mode 8, in a single color. When I placed single pixels or vertical lines on the screen, they would be blue colored if they were on an odd column, and red if they were on an even column. This was commonly used as a hack to make graphics mode 8 display red and blue as well as black and white.
This shows the limits of a typical TV set. The dot pitch is so large that these color artifacts show up in 320x240 resolution. Your typical VHS VCR would be capable of the equivalent of 320 pixels across (the signal may have finer horizontal detail, but the TV won't be able to make use of it,) and 480 lines down, interlaced. Color is analog, so it can't translate to color depth, but NTSC got the nickname "Never Twice the Same Color" for a reason.
In short, VHS/NTSC quality is truly awful, the only reason it's viewable at all is because the picture is constantly moving, so your brain can interpolate more detail into the image from the multiple frames.
For something like this, you may be stuck writing a script. The reason I recommended Expect is because this tool makes these kinds of scripts incredibly easy to write (especially compared to writing the same scripts in Perl). Give it a shot.
I'd also suggest finding an RPM of the updated netscape, then the code for updating Netscape in Expect would be:
I work in a testing lab where we have to run large numbers of regression tests that would be incredibly time consuming if we didn't use automation tools.
I've been using Expect for test automation on the latest series of tests. Expect is an automation scripting tool that runs on top of Tcl. It is very useful for automating command-line based applications using "send <string> expect <string>" sequences.
As far as licensing is concerned, Expect was developed at the NIST, and has been released into the public domain. That's about as free as you can get.
I've run lots of computers with the covers off. As others mentioned, the intensity of the radiation drops off exponentially with distance, so as long as you don't sit with your jewels hanging right over your Athlon's fans, you should be fine.
This doesn't answer my question though. Has anyone here actually been busted by the FCC or any other agency because of EMI from their machines? I doubt they would care unless you were broadcasting a LOT of noise.
Many motherboard manufacturers (and other hardware manufactureres) use BIOS update utilities that can only be run from MS-DOS. They will not work from within a command prompt running within Windows, these utilities require that the user reboot, hit F8, and go to the command prompt without loading Windows in order for the utility to work correctly. If the update utility malfunctions in the middle of the flash update, it could leave the system completely dead until the BIOS chip on the board is replaced.
Clearly, this step by Microsoft was inevitable, as the reason why the Win9x/ME series has so many stability problems is because it runs on top of legacy MS-DOS and Win 3.x code. (Try using Nuts & Bolts or some other utility to look at the running processes that don't show up when you press Ctrl-Alt-Del -- major parts of Windows 9x/ME are still 16 bit code.) This legacy code has no memory protection (very bad, especially when the legacy code is part of the OS core), switches the system from using preemptive multitasking to cooperative multitasking - causing more performance problems and stability problems, and is a major headache for everyone from customers to Microsoft to Linux hackers.
Microsoft has been looking for years for a way to get rid of all this legacy garbage, and it appears they have finally found the way to wean users off of old 16 bit code and move them permanently to the NT/2000 kernel. The hardware manufacturers are going to have to rewrite their update utilities so they can run within Windows, but in the short term, everyone is in for some major headaches.
Our schools teach lots of science that isn't 100% known or proven - like the nature of subatomic particles, which was taught in my high school while scientists were arguing over things such as the projected mass of the Top quark.
Evolution should absolutely be taught at our schools. It is the best scientifically derived theory we have that explains how we came to be. If you want your kids to learn Creationism, send them to Sunday School. Religious mythology does not belong in public schools.
One of the reasons why Earth is such a great place for life to develop is because Jupiter's gravity pulls in lots of stray comets and asteroids that would have otherwise hit the Earth, causing extinction events & worse. It looks like Epsilon Eridani has a planet that could perform a similar function, making it more likely that advanced life would exist on a planet that was in the star's biozone.
How can anyone call us selfish?
on
Selfish Society
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· Score: 1
Look at the open source community. All of the software out there that we use on a daily basis - Linux, Apache, Samba, gcc, sendmail, Gnome, KDE (no license flames please...), nearly everything RedHat has written, this is just a tiny fraction of the immense library of software that programmers have donated to the community for the sake of giving.
Look at the library of HOWTOs at the Linux Documentation Project, which were written for the express purpose of helping newbies understand their systems. Most of these people (including me) have not recieved a single cent for their efforts. They worked cause they believed in giving back to the community.
If after seeing all of that effort donated to the world community, you still think that the technical community is selfish, you've got one sad worldview.
I don't suppose it would be possible to include some scripts, or an addition to linuxconf & such that would enable the less-than-expert users to automagially snarf his True-Type fonts from his Windows partitions if he's dual booting. I've done this myself on several occasions, but it is a pain to copy all the.ttf files, run mkfontdir, set the fontpath & do all the other things to make X see the fonts correctly.
One of the big showstoppers for a manned mission to Mars is radiation. While astronauts in low earth orbit are protected somewhat by the Earth's Van Allen belts, there is no such protection in deep space between Earth and Mars, and astronauts would end up taking enough radiation to exceed their lifetime dosage limits, increase the risk of cancer and cause all sorts of nasty permanent health problems. If plasma shields could deflect some of that radiation, that would be nice.
I'd already mentioned this in Kuro5hin, but it's worth repeating. Given that Carnivore is set up between the ISP's main routers and the rest of the Internet (I'm not sure this is the case, but let's pretend it is...) they can do all sorts of creative things if they weren't restrained by ethics and the Bill of Rights including:
Man in the Middle Attacks: Carnivore's placement on the ISP is about the best place you can get for executing these attacks, especially when networked with other Carnivore machines - they can intercept encryption keys sent by Bad Guys (such as folks in the NAACP, ACLU or Peacefire), replace them with their own keys, and be able to snoop on & tamper with messages at will.
Selective, Covert Censorship: If as Cringely suggests, Carnivore is able to shut off an ISP's entire connection to the Internet, they could do that, but wouldn't be able to get away with if for long. It would be much easier to have Carnivore silently drop packets containing information the FBI deems undesireable, and most users wouldn't know why - servers must be busy or something.
A little bit of law enforcement arm twisting would help make sure the sysadmins didn't try to interfere with these activities. Sleep tight everyone...
"Respectable" telemarketing firms pay thousands of dollars for their phone lists to businesses (such as your bank.) They also purchase demographic data to help them target their victims. (phone scam businesses typically target little old ladies - they're easy to badger into giving away their life savings.)
In some cases where the government refused to disclose evidence because of secrecy concerns (the old "National Security" thing), some judges have been known to take the government attorneys and witnesses into their private chambers and have them show the evidence there, and demand to know why the evidence needs to remain secret.
<RAMBLE> This happened in one case involving Area 51 and the secret activities that happen there - the judge got tired of hearing "sorry, we can't tell you - National Security" and brought the feds into his chambers for an explanation. When they all came out, the judge ruled the evidence was to remain secret...</RAMBLE>
Choosing pictures and such randomly is one way, choosing message elements specifically to deceive the Bad Guys is another idea - sending TIFFs of the Great Wall to make the spooks think the sender is just a tourist emailing his buddies is a very simple way of deceiving the authorities, the "Food for the NSA" keywords (plutonium neutronium Middle East Ecstasy Echelon hello to my friends in domestic surveillance) is another method. Be creative.
Speaking about jewels, most people with cell phones clip them on their belts or pant pockets when they aren't using them, for hours or days at a time. As most cell phones transmit all the time, this makes me wonder what happens to organs that are in close proximity, say the jewels or the kidneys.
I have a cell phone, but I keep in mind a very important feature of my cell phone called a power button. When I don't want to be bothered, I turn the thing off and let all calls be redirected to voice-jail. (Also great when in restaurants, movie theaters, behind the wheel of a car, etc.) I control my cell phone (also a pager, has voice-mail, etc.) and do not let it control me.
In the same way, I do not let my job control me. I walked off one job when the stress got bad enough to start making me sick, and I refused to accept an offer from another company when I learned they expected 60-80 hour weeks, + 24/7 availability - I called them and told them I wouldn't accept a position with them. In both cases, I had another job with reasonable hours and reduced stress levels in just a few weeks. No job is worth destroying your health.
How much did Intel pay the brand consultants to come up with "Pentium 4"? Those guys literally get paid millions to come up with things like the Lucent coffee stain logo, the AT&T Death Star, the name Agilent (sounds like a washing machine company,) etc.
With all the news about Rambus' patents and dealings with Intel, along with AMD's problems getting manufacturers to make enough motherboards for the Athlon and Duron, it's good to see that Transmeta is bringing more competition to an industry that has to deal with too many predatory monopolies.
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Unfortunately, you can't play on Battle.Net with a cracked DII binary - the servers check the game version somehow and refuses to talk to modified binaries.
More important is writing good code in the first place. I've seen both really good code and really awful spaghetti code. Really good code is so clear and understandable that it almost doesn't need documentation, while no amount of documentation could possibly improve badly written code. I've also seen decent code that has been polluted by useless comments such as:
Even if it was possible to impose a set of style guidelines on the Open Source community, I wouldn't want to. Good code, and good documentation in the code is a fine art. A few hints can be found in various code style guides, but the only way to learn to write good code and comments is to read good and bad examples of other people's code, and to practice.
Granted, this isn't platform independent, but I've found that I've learned more about Linux and Unix by playing with the system, rather than reading books. You might want to consider handing out Linux CDs so people who want to can install them and play with them.
Aside from that, a really good book that is largely platform neutral is Unix Power Tools. It is a huge collection of tips and tricks that demonstrate the true power of Unix.
Manufacturers have very low yields when making TFT active matrix LCD displays. Most plants have a "glass mountain" of discarded defective LCD displays, so the end result is high prices and pixel defects.
I'm waiting for newer, cheaper technologies, such as the light-emitting-polymer displays which can be made by printing the polymers onto the display with a special inkjet printer.
This is straight out of Dilbert - the PHB decides to use this scheme. He describes it as being modeled after public bathroom stalls, but calls it "hotelling" because it increases the chances he'll get tips. Before long, Wally takes up the fine art of graffiti to give himself a sense of home again. Scott Adams claims hotelling sends the message to workers that they're one foot out the door at all times.
This stuff could be combined with blood plasma. Blood plasma is more readily available than whole blood, since donors have to wait 8 weeks to donate again after they've donated whole blood, but they only have to wait 3 days if they only give plasma.
NTSC (the standard signal for American TVs) has 525 lines of resolution, but only 480 lines of visible picture. The remainder is taken up in the vertical blank interval. The signal is interlaced, so the odd scanlines are displayed on one frame, the even scanlines on the next frame. As far as horizontal resolution, there isn't a real pixel value since the signal is analog.
However, I remember some facts from when I used my Atari 400 computer. It had a maximum resolution of 320x192 pixels in graphics mode 8, in a single color. When I placed single pixels or vertical lines on the screen, they would be blue colored if they were on an odd column, and red if they were on an even column. This was commonly used as a hack to make graphics mode 8 display red and blue as well as black and white.
This shows the limits of a typical TV set. The dot pitch is so large that these color artifacts show up in 320x240 resolution. Your typical VHS VCR would be capable of the equivalent of 320 pixels across (the signal may have finer horizontal detail, but the TV won't be able to make use of it,) and 480 lines down, interlaced. Color is analog, so it can't translate to color depth, but NTSC got the nickname "Never Twice the Same Color" for a reason.
In short, VHS/NTSC quality is truly awful, the only reason it's viewable at all is because the picture is constantly moving, so your brain can interpolate more detail into the image from the multiple frames.
For something like this, you may be stuck writing a script. The reason I recommended Expect is because this tool makes these kinds of scripts incredibly easy to write (especially compared to writing the same scripts in Perl). Give it a shot.
I'd also suggest finding an RPM of the updated netscape, then the code for updating Netscape in Expect would be:
spawn "rlogin $hostname\r" ;#root shell prompt... ;#RPM switches right?
expect "#"
send "rpm -Uvh netscape.rpm\r"
expect "#"
send "logout\r"
I work in a testing lab where we have to run large numbers of regression tests that would be incredibly time consuming if we didn't use automation tools.
I've been using Expect for test automation on the latest series of tests. Expect is an automation scripting tool that runs on top of Tcl. It is very useful for automating command-line based applications using "send <string> expect <string>" sequences.
As far as licensing is concerned, Expect was developed at the NIST, and has been released into the public domain. That's about as free as you can get.
I've run lots of computers with the covers off. As others mentioned, the intensity of the radiation drops off exponentially with distance, so as long as you don't sit with your jewels hanging right over your Athlon's fans, you should be fine.
This doesn't answer my question though. Has anyone here actually been busted by the FCC or any other agency because of EMI from their machines? I doubt they would care unless you were broadcasting a LOT of noise.
Many motherboard manufacturers (and other hardware manufactureres) use BIOS update utilities that can only be run from MS-DOS. They will not work from within a command prompt running within Windows, these utilities require that the user reboot, hit F8, and go to the command prompt without loading Windows in order for the utility to work correctly. If the update utility malfunctions in the middle of the flash update, it could leave the system completely dead until the BIOS chip on the board is replaced.
Clearly, this step by Microsoft was inevitable, as the reason why the Win9x/ME series has so many stability problems is because it runs on top of legacy MS-DOS and Win 3.x code. (Try using Nuts & Bolts or some other utility to look at the running processes that don't show up when you press Ctrl-Alt-Del -- major parts of Windows 9x/ME are still 16 bit code.) This legacy code has no memory protection (very bad, especially when the legacy code is part of the OS core), switches the system from using preemptive multitasking to cooperative multitasking - causing more performance problems and stability problems, and is a major headache for everyone from customers to Microsoft to Linux hackers.
Microsoft has been looking for years for a way to get rid of all this legacy garbage, and it appears they have finally found the way to wean users off of old 16 bit code and move them permanently to the NT/2000 kernel. The hardware manufacturers are going to have to rewrite their update utilities so they can run within Windows, but in the short term, everyone is in for some major headaches.
I think I'll call it Bob... I can be the King of Bob!
Our schools teach lots of science that isn't 100% known or proven - like the nature of subatomic particles, which was taught in my high school while scientists were arguing over things such as the projected mass of the Top quark.
Evolution should absolutely be taught at our schools. It is the best scientifically derived theory we have that explains how we came to be. If you want your kids to learn Creationism, send them to Sunday School. Religious mythology does not belong in public schools.
One of the reasons why Earth is such a great place for life to develop is because Jupiter's gravity pulls in lots of stray comets and asteroids that would have otherwise hit the Earth, causing extinction events & worse. It looks like Epsilon Eridani has a planet that could perform a similar function, making it more likely that advanced life would exist on a planet that was in the star's biozone.
Look at the open source community. All of the software out there that we use on a daily basis - Linux, Apache, Samba, gcc, sendmail, Gnome, KDE (no license flames please...), nearly everything RedHat has written, this is just a tiny fraction of the immense library of software that programmers have donated to the community for the sake of giving.
Look at the library of HOWTOs at the Linux Documentation Project, which were written for the express purpose of helping newbies understand their systems. Most of these people (including me) have not recieved a single cent for their efforts. They worked cause they believed in giving back to the community.
If after seeing all of that effort donated to the world community, you still think that the technical community is selfish, you've got one sad worldview.
I don't suppose it would be possible to include some scripts, or an addition to linuxconf & such that would enable the less-than-expert users to automagially snarf his True-Type fonts from his Windows partitions if he's dual booting. I've done this myself on several occasions, but it is a pain to copy all the .ttf files, run mkfontdir, set the fontpath & do all the other things to make X see the fonts correctly.
One of the big showstoppers for a manned mission to Mars is radiation. While astronauts in low earth orbit are protected somewhat by the Earth's Van Allen belts, there is no such protection in deep space between Earth and Mars, and astronauts would end up taking enough radiation to exceed their lifetime dosage limits, increase the risk of cancer and cause all sorts of nasty permanent health problems. If plasma shields could deflect some of that radiation, that would be nice.
I'd already mentioned this in Kuro5hin, but it's worth repeating. Given that Carnivore is set up between the ISP's main routers and the rest of the Internet (I'm not sure this is the case, but let's pretend it is...) they can do all sorts of creative things if they weren't restrained by ethics and the Bill of Rights including:
A little bit of law enforcement arm twisting would help make sure the sysadmins didn't try to interfere with these activities. Sleep tight everyone...
"Respectable" telemarketing firms pay thousands of dollars for their phone lists to businesses (such as your bank.) They also purchase demographic data to help them target their victims. (phone scam businesses typically target little old ladies - they're easy to badger into giving away their life savings.)
In some cases where the government refused to disclose evidence because of secrecy concerns (the old "National Security" thing), some judges have been known to take the government attorneys and witnesses into their private chambers and have them show the evidence there, and demand to know why the evidence needs to remain secret.
<RAMBLE> This happened in one case involving Area 51 and the secret activities that happen there - the judge got tired of hearing "sorry, we can't tell you - National Security" and brought the feds into his chambers for an explanation. When they all came out, the judge ruled the evidence was to remain secret...</RAMBLE>
Choosing pictures and such randomly is one way, choosing message elements specifically to deceive the Bad Guys is another idea - sending TIFFs of the Great Wall to make the spooks think the sender is just a tourist emailing his buddies is a very simple way of deceiving the authorities, the "Food for the NSA" keywords (plutonium neutronium Middle East Ecstasy Echelon hello to my friends in domestic surveillance) is another method. Be creative.
Speaking about jewels, most people with cell phones clip them on their belts or pant pockets when they aren't using them, for hours or days at a time. As most cell phones transmit all the time, this makes me wonder what happens to organs that are in close proximity, say the jewels or the kidneys.
I have a cell phone, but I keep in mind a very important feature of my cell phone called a power button. When I don't want to be bothered, I turn the thing off and let all calls be redirected to voice-jail. (Also great when in restaurants, movie theaters, behind the wheel of a car, etc.) I control my cell phone (also a pager, has voice-mail, etc.) and do not let it control me.
In the same way, I do not let my job control me. I walked off one job when the stress got bad enough to start making me sick, and I refused to accept an offer from another company when I learned they expected 60-80 hour weeks, + 24/7 availability - I called them and told them I wouldn't accept a position with them. In both cases, I had another job with reasonable hours and reduced stress levels in just a few weeks. No job is worth destroying your health.
How much did Intel pay the brand consultants to come up with "Pentium 4"? Those guys literally get paid millions to come up with things like the Lucent coffee stain logo, the AT&T Death Star, the name Agilent (sounds like a washing machine company,) etc.
With all the news about Rambus' patents and dealings with Intel, along with AMD's problems getting manufacturers to make enough motherboards for the Athlon and Duron, it's good to see that Transmeta is bringing more competition to an industry that has to deal with too many predatory monopolies.