Who is the worse culprit, those who engage in friendly fire, or those who return the fire _knowing_ it's friendlies they're shooting at?
Seems to me that Mozilla probably picked this without knowing about FirebirdSQL, but the FSQL team is responding with underhanded tactics.
I'd think that having the same name as Mozilla's browser lite would help rather than hinder a little-known DB. I'd never heard of FSQL before today, and I've been involved in open-source for several years.
There's never gonna be a single source for all things security--even for a single item such as Apache. Those looking for a good start can go with this book, or google for how-to's, but another place is www.securityspace.com.
If you're running a web server, use my painfully-earned experience and never trust a single source to tell you you're secure. (This includes you. Get someone else to double-check your servers for you. Otherwise, you will never know what you missed until it's too late.)
According to Sport Rider, Alpinstars (another Italian company) and Honda have teamed up to produce their own air vest, set to deploy in only 15 milliseconds. The older, lanyard-based (not Dainese) vest can take up to 80.
I was recently in a motorcycle accident which could have been much less if I had been wearing a vest like this, in addition to the gear I was already wearing (I T-boned a car at ~40mph).
At my last job, we had similar to what you're looking for and paid $895 w/ 2 year contract. It was just outside a small city, and location can change price a lot. It was nice having our servers locally, and we got good service too!
Palpatine/Sidious never does get "sensed." Even in ROTJ, Luke sense Darth but not Palpatine. Palpatine doesn't even seem to sense Luke. I wonder if he's supposed to be clouding sensing in both directions regarding himself. That's what's always made sense to me.
I liked ATOC. It's true to Star Wars (good FX, bad acting, really bad love scenes; all in all, a very enjoyable movie).
Nothing from Lucas will ever be perfect. He his much better at making money than movies.
"The first legislation that I produced relating to the Internet was a bill to overturn a restriction inside of the law that prohibited the Internet backbone from being used for anything other than research and scientific and educational communication."
It sound like Boucher deserves credit for enabling the dotcom boom, giving us all jobs.
hooray for him!
But the converse is also true: he is responsible for the dotcom bust and many repo'd BMWs.
boo!
I think it's great that there is at least one representative that seems to understand technology and its inherent risks and opportunities.
Fair Use should be a right accorded along the lines of the right to privacy. It's not mentioned in the Constitution directly, but it's still defended in the courts.
Vivendi Universal seems to be on a rampage protecting its rights. I am against piracy, either individually or corporate-based, but is Vivendi getting picked on, or are they over-belligerent?
Vivendi could simply be protecting its encryption as they say, but after their actions regarding bnetd (and email responses received from them after voicing my complaint), I am definitely leaning toward the side of *anyone Vivendi takes action against.*
'Science reaches a point where they can not predict or test their theories and the scientests say "we don't know yet".'
But a big problem with science (as it's taught in the US public school system) Is that "We don't know yet" is left out and substituted with "This is what happened" at the lower grades to "Scientists believe..." (and scientists are smarter than you). By the time students are taught "we don't know yet" (high school to college), they have already been conditioned to believe it. Not terribly different than a typical religious household, but evolutionism is supposed to be based on science. This a brainwashing tactic, especially when operated in tax-funded schools!
So why are evolutonism's tactics (that I would expect only of a religion or totalitarian regime--not from science or scientists) more honest than creationism?
The big difference I see between creationism and evolutionism is that evolutionism claims to be backed up by science, but if you trace it back far enough, you find that it requires, at the very least, one magical *poof* to get things started. Creationism requires a similar number of *poofs,* but it also acknowledges its need.
So to me (regardless of some people's debate ethics), creationism is more intellectually honest than evolutionism.
Kneht
(please note my use of "isms" to indicate general world-views, not specifics.)
Rudimentary cache (since Google doesn't have it)
on
Physical ASCII Mosaic
·
· Score: 3, Offtopic
Sorry I can't help out with the/. effect completely, but here's a start (it's long):
Physical Graffiti ASCII
The adage states that 'a picture is worth a thousand words.' I'm not sure about that, but I can say one's worth about thirty thousand letters...
Question: What should one do with about a quarter million Modulex bricks?
This is not a question that most people will face in their lifetime. For that matter, few LEGO collectors will need to consider it. However, last fall I was sent a couple small Modulex bricks in the mail by a fellow, Ted, who had worked for LEGO some time ago. Ironically, my first thought when seeing the tiny bricks was, "these are so small, they're like toys!" -- as if the standard LEGO brick is not meant to be a toy.
Anyway, my interest was certainly piqued by these 'elfin sized' bricks, and I started doing some investigation. After a couple months of searching and researching, I stumbled into quite a find: for a (fairly reasonable) price I managed to put myself in half-ownership of approximately half a million Modulex bricks. Old, yes, but sealed in boxes and in mint condition.
So, I then had to ask myself what I would do with my new 'toys.'
What should one actually do with a quarter million Modulex bricks?
Some type of mosaic came to mind as the Modulex bricks are smaller than typical LEGO bricks, and the colors are different (more pastel).
What really intrigued me, though, was the fact that among the many, many bricks were some tiny 1x1 smooth bricks (tiles) that were white with black letters and numbers imprinted upon them.
What are "Modulex" bricks?
Modulex bricks are smaller 'cousins' of LEGO bricks . They were originally developed by the LEGO company (many decades ago) and marketed to professional architecture firms and such (not as a retail toy). Possibly to the surprise of many LEGO collectors, these bricks are still manufactured today (by the now independent, but LEGO-related, company Modulex).
Modulex bricks are not compatible with typical LEGO bricks. The standard 1x1 Modulex brick (or 'component' as the company refers to them) is 5mm cubed (yes, they are perfect cubes, unlike LEGO unit bricks which are taller than they are wide or deep).
The colors are also different than LEGO colors... much more in the 'pastel' frame of mind they are.
Buying new Modulex bricks is not cheap; piece by piece they would end up being more expensive than LEGO bricks on average.
There are Modulex collectors about, however, and if one searches hard enough, one can sometimes find old ones for sale. The eBay auction site can be quite handy in this instance.
I got my idea.
I'd do a mosaic, but instead of using colors, I'd use the letter and number tiles to create a picture reminiscent of the old 'ASCII art' one can find on the web (and which was certainly around long before the web).
Physical ASCII. How pseudo-retro-techno.
Okay then, a physical ASCII mosaic. But a mosaic of what?
I was sick of building LEGO cartoon/comic characters, so that was out.
I considered a picture from another fascination of mine: Alice in Wonderland (qq.v. Alice, White Rabbit Mosaic ), but the original Tenniel drawings that I like are all pretty much black and white with little gray shading... not very conducive to ASCII art really.
So, with cartoon characters and Alice discarded, I turned to the next obvious thing: an actress (this may not be too obvious, but for anyone who knows me, this should not be a big surprise).
I decided to use a picture of Calista Flockhart.
Okay, I had my picture. Next I downloaded a freely available software program: ASCII Generator.
This nifty tool did just about all that I needed. I could specify what letters to use (and which were 'darkest' and which 'lightest'). I could specify how many pixels of width to give each letter (when printed normally, most fonts have letters that are taller than they are wide; my bricks, however, were square, so I needed to be able to adjust accordingly). All in all, the program was invaluable.
I did run into one snag, however.
See, in all the little letter tiles I had obtained, the distribution of particular letters and numbers was far from equal. For example, I had over five thousand U's, but only twenty-four C's (not twenty-four thousand, just twenty-four... two dozen).
The ASCII Generator program did not care what my supply actually was, so it just used as many of each letter as it deemed necessary. As a result, the output (which was 140 letters wide and 240 letters high) did not come close to matching the letter supply I actually had.
I solved the problem by grouping certain letters together into groups based on their darkness (so, say, the W's and X's and H's were in one group at the dark end while the I's and L's and J's were in the lightest group). With about 6 groups formed using all the tiles I did have, I then wrote a Perl script that analyzed the output from the ASCII program.
My script would look at the letter in each space as designated by the ASCII Generator and then see to which group it belonged. Next, it would randomly pick a letter from that group. This 'randomness' however was weighted so that the letters within the group of which I had the most would be most likely picked. Letters of which I had very few were proportionally less likely to be picked.
The picked letter from the group (which might, in fact, be the same as the original letter analyzed) was then substituted in the ASCII picture.
When the whole text file was thus filtered, I ended up with an ASCII image in which the darkness and lightness was pretty much the same as the original ASCII output, but I was guaranteed to have the necessary letters.
Whew.
With all that done, I could then actually start building.
Oh wait. There was one more problem. I had about 60,000 letter tiles at my disposal, but I had no baseplates to which I could attach them.
I ended up ordering some from the U.S. importer of Modulex products. This was not particularly cheap or timely, but about five weeks later I managed to get the baseplates I needed.
And I began the actual building of the mosaic.
I have constructed plenty of LEGO mosaic in the past (qq.v. New York City, Mona Lisa, San Francisco ), so I was almost prepared for this task. There are notable differences between Modulex mosaic building and LEGO mosaic building, however. Most noticable is the fact that the minute Modulex bricks are *that much harder* to pick up and maneuver. Nimble fingers are required.
Modulex bricks also seem to attach more securely to the baseplates (more securely than LEGO bricks do to LEGO baseplates), and this is nice. However, it also means that a bit more force is need to make each little click. Tough fingers are required.
And finally, since I was creating a mosaic with little letters and numbers, I had to be sure that each brick was positioned with the correct orientation (no upside down P's for me, buddy).
Anyway... in the end, I got the darn thing done. The final 'Calista mosaic' is currently hanging on a wall in my house, and I hope to transport it to the Brickswest (2002) convention.
The mosaic used about 30,000 pieces (the 140 by 240 area for the letters, with some of the white spaces filled by larger tiles, and finally a border).
This, of course, means that I have about 30,000 or so letter tiles remaining. Enough for another mosaic! Heh... not one for myself, but I'd could always do one on commission, by request. Such a commssion would not be cheap of course (for a similarly sized mosaic -- 30 inches by 50 inches -- you could expect a price tag of many, many thousands of dollars).
But if you're game, let me know... I obviously have a limited supply, so it'd be first come, first serve... requests from actresses would get preferential consideration, of course [grin].
What I'm going to do with the rest of my Modulex stash (the non-letter bricks)... well, I'm still trying to figure that out.
I can't see this helping IT managers as much as implementing thin clients. Everytime I had to troubleshoot a problem, I'd have to first determine if it were local or central. Even semi-thin clients will give an error that's easy to determine whether the problem is server-side or not.
On the other hand, maybe it would just require a paradigm shift...
Slashdot Mirror
Can I just install MoneyGoBackToMyPlace, or is it just an add-on that requires MoneyDance, MoneyDinner, and MoneyMovie be installed first?
"Sometimes I work so fast that I become invisible."
Follow this up with, "Do I look blurry to you?"
thanks to Scott Adams :)
Seems to me that Mozilla probably picked this without knowing about FirebirdSQL, but the FSQL team is responding with underhanded tactics.
I'd think that having the same name as Mozilla's browser lite would help rather than hinder a little-known DB. I'd never heard of FSQL before today, and I've been involved in open-source for several years.
kneht
If you're running a web server, use my painfully-earned experience and never trust a single source to tell you you're secure. (This includes you. Get someone else to double-check your servers for you. Otherwise, you will never know what you missed until it's too late.)
kneht
PDAs are getting bigger, better screens ...
GPSs are getting bigger, better screens ... (for mapping)
These devices can no longer always be small. Having a single screen for several devices helps offset this fact.
According to Sport Rider, Alpinstars (another Italian company) and Honda have teamed up to produce their own air vest, set to deploy in only 15 milliseconds. The older, lanyard-based (not Dainese) vest can take up to 80. I was recently in a motorcycle accident which could have been much less if I had been wearing a vest like this, in addition to the gear I was already wearing (I T-boned a car at ~40mph).
At my last job, we had similar to what you're looking for and paid $895 w/ 2 year contract. It was just outside a small city, and location can change price a lot. It was nice having our servers locally, and we got good service too!
I liked ATOC. It's true to Star Wars (good FX, bad acting, really bad love scenes; all in all, a very enjoyable movie).
Nothing from Lucas will ever be perfect. He his much better at making money than movies.
hooray for him!
But the converse is also true: he is responsible for the dotcom bust and many repo'd BMWs.
boo!
I think it's great that there is at least one representative that seems to understand technology and its inherent risks and opportunities.
Fair Use should be a right accorded along the lines of the right to privacy. It's not mentioned in the Constitution directly, but it's still defended in the courts.
This, of course, varies by country and state.
Vivendi could simply be protecting its encryption as they say, but after their actions regarding bnetd (and email responses received from them after voicing my complaint), I am definitely leaning toward the side of *anyone Vivendi takes action against.*
Anyone else feel this way?
So why are evolutonism's tactics (that I would expect only of a religion or totalitarian regime--not from science or scientists) more honest than creationism?
So to me (regardless of some people's debate ethics), creationism is more intellectually honest than evolutionism.
Kneht
(please note my use of "isms" to indicate general world-views, not specifics.)
Physical Graffiti ASCII
The adage states that 'a picture is worth a thousand words.' I'm not sure about that, but I can say one's worth about thirty thousand letters...
Question: What should one do with about a quarter million Modulex bricks?
This is not a question that most people will face in their lifetime. For that matter, few LEGO collectors will need to consider it. However, last fall I was sent a couple small Modulex bricks in the mail by a fellow, Ted, who had worked for LEGO some time ago. Ironically, my first thought when seeing the tiny bricks was, "these are so small, they're like toys!" -- as if the standard LEGO brick is not meant to be a toy.
Anyway, my interest was certainly piqued by these 'elfin sized' bricks, and I started doing some investigation. After a couple months of searching and researching, I stumbled into quite a find: for a (fairly reasonable) price I managed to put myself in half-ownership of approximately half a million Modulex bricks. Old, yes, but sealed in boxes and in mint condition.
So, I then had to ask myself what I would do with my new 'toys.'
What should one actually do with a quarter million Modulex bricks?
Some type of mosaic came to mind as the Modulex bricks are smaller than typical LEGO bricks, and the colors are different (more pastel).
What really intrigued me, though, was the fact that among the many, many bricks were some tiny 1x1 smooth bricks (tiles) that were white with black letters and numbers imprinted upon them.
What are "Modulex" bricks? Modulex bricks are smaller 'cousins' of LEGO bricks . They were originally developed by the LEGO company (many decades ago) and marketed to professional architecture firms and such (not as a retail toy). Possibly to the surprise of many LEGO collectors, these bricks are still manufactured today (by the now independent, but LEGO-related, company Modulex).
Modulex bricks are not compatible with typical LEGO bricks. The standard 1x1 Modulex brick (or 'component' as the company refers to them) is 5mm cubed (yes, they are perfect cubes, unlike LEGO unit bricks which are taller than they are wide or deep).
The colors are also different than LEGO colors... much more in the 'pastel' frame of mind they are.
Buying new Modulex bricks is not cheap; piece by piece they would end up being more expensive than LEGO bricks on average.
There are Modulex collectors about, however, and if one searches hard enough, one can sometimes find old ones for sale. The eBay auction site can be quite handy in this instance. I got my idea.
I'd do a mosaic, but instead of using colors, I'd use the letter and number tiles to create a picture reminiscent of the old 'ASCII art' one can find on the web (and which was certainly around long before the web).
Physical ASCII. How pseudo-retro-techno.
Okay then, a physical ASCII mosaic. But a mosaic of what?
I was sick of building LEGO cartoon/comic characters, so that was out.
I considered a picture from another fascination of mine: Alice in Wonderland (qq.v. Alice, White Rabbit Mosaic ), but the original Tenniel drawings that I like are all pretty much black and white with little gray shading... not very conducive to ASCII art really.
So, with cartoon characters and Alice discarded, I turned to the next obvious thing: an actress (this may not be too obvious, but for anyone who knows me, this should not be a big surprise).
I decided to use a picture of Calista Flockhart.
Okay, I had my picture. Next I downloaded a freely available software program: ASCII Generator.
This nifty tool did just about all that I needed. I could specify what letters to use (and which were 'darkest' and which 'lightest'). I could specify how many pixels of width to give each letter (when printed normally, most fonts have letters that are taller than they are wide; my bricks, however, were square, so I needed to be able to adjust accordingly). All in all, the program was invaluable.
I did run into one snag, however.
See, in all the little letter tiles I had obtained, the distribution of particular letters and numbers was far from equal. For example, I had over five thousand U's, but only twenty-four C's (not twenty-four thousand, just twenty-four... two dozen).
The ASCII Generator program did not care what my supply actually was, so it just used as many of each letter as it deemed necessary. As a result, the output (which was 140 letters wide and 240 letters high) did not come close to matching the letter supply I actually had.
I solved the problem by grouping certain letters together into groups based on their darkness (so, say, the W's and X's and H's were in one group at the dark end while the I's and L's and J's were in the lightest group). With about 6 groups formed using all the tiles I did have, I then wrote a Perl script that analyzed the output from the ASCII program.
My script would look at the letter in each space as designated by the ASCII Generator and then see to which group it belonged. Next, it would randomly pick a letter from that group. This 'randomness' however was weighted so that the letters within the group of which I had the most would be most likely picked. Letters of which I had very few were proportionally less likely to be picked.
The picked letter from the group (which might, in fact, be the same as the original letter analyzed) was then substituted in the ASCII picture.
When the whole text file was thus filtered, I ended up with an ASCII image in which the darkness and lightness was pretty much the same as the original ASCII output, but I was guaranteed to have the necessary letters.
Whew.
With all that done, I could then actually start building.
Oh wait. There was one more problem. I had about 60,000 letter tiles at my disposal, but I had no baseplates to which I could attach them.
I ended up ordering some from the U.S. importer of Modulex products. This was not particularly cheap or timely, but about five weeks later I managed to get the baseplates I needed.
And I began the actual building of the mosaic.
I have constructed plenty of LEGO mosaic in the past (qq.v. New York City, Mona Lisa, San Francisco ), so I was almost prepared for this task. There are notable differences between Modulex mosaic building and LEGO mosaic building, however. Most noticable is the fact that the minute Modulex bricks are *that much harder* to pick up and maneuver. Nimble fingers are required.
Modulex bricks also seem to attach more securely to the baseplates (more securely than LEGO bricks do to LEGO baseplates), and this is nice. However, it also means that a bit more force is need to make each little click. Tough fingers are required.
And finally, since I was creating a mosaic with little letters and numbers, I had to be sure that each brick was positioned with the correct orientation (no upside down P's for me, buddy).
Anyway... in the end, I got the darn thing done. The final 'Calista mosaic' is currently hanging on a wall in my house, and I hope to transport it to the Brickswest (2002) convention.
The mosaic used about 30,000 pieces (the 140 by 240 area for the letters, with some of the white spaces filled by larger tiles, and finally a border).
This, of course, means that I have about 30,000 or so letter tiles remaining. Enough for another mosaic! Heh... not one for myself, but I'd could always do one on commission, by request. Such a commssion would not be cheap of course (for a similarly sized mosaic -- 30 inches by 50 inches -- you could expect a price tag of many, many thousands of dollars).
But if you're game, let me know... I obviously have a limited supply, so it'd be first come, first serve... requests from actresses would get preferential consideration, of course [grin].
What I'm going to do with the rest of my Modulex stash (the non-letter bricks)... well, I'm still trying to figure that out.
Also, how much power does PC133 ram require? Would a rechargeable battery add too much to heat/cost considerations?
This is something I'd be interested in for a number of uses (image editing, etc.)
What does that say about the American public's view of candidates?
Does that mean we are ready for a 3rd party or independant like Ventura? Or are people just sick of politics as usual?
On the other hand, maybe it would just require a paradigm shift...