I'm up in NorCal now, but I have to ask - why not leave for a few days anyway? It's always seemed to me that if you're waiting for a helicopter to tell you to get the hell out that maybe it's a bit late...particularly when most of the deaths have been people trying to get away in their cars.
I'm not trying to preach doom and gloom, but I think if a fire of that magnitude was anywhere near my house up here I'd go crash at a friend's place out of town for a few days. I can see the desire to try to save the house, but I think if I'm in a position where I need to bust out the garden hose I'm probably screwed.
Besides - the laws of physics say that chosing the premature evacuation ensures that the fire won't come anywhere near the house:)
So I'm pretty interested - what is the motivation to stick around?
That's an interlaced 720x480 so it's pretty ugly even for that...
And once you watch a couple things in 1080i or 720p you'll see just how bad 480i looks. A friend of mine has a plasma (a 1024x1024 one, not a crappy 852xWhatever one). It's still not at native HDTV resolutions, but holy shit...The difference is staggering, especially on live events (it really shines on sports). And it's picked up over a little antenna on the roof (pretty much all of the broadcast channels in the Bay Area are broadcasting ATSC already and probably half of primetime and 1/2 of sports are in HDTV)
The only problem with it is that now whenever any of us try to watch something that's in analog we have to turn it off because it looks like it's out of focus. Yes, this is even compared to the "DVD Quality" directv (dvd quality my ass, it's full of compression artifacts...but better than digital cable, that's for sure)
Sign up for the Student Developer program (on a link at developer.apple.com). Costs you $99, but you get a 20% hardware discount once a year and you get OS updates in the mail. I haven't even ordered my G5 yet, but I got an email saying I'd get the 4 CD set of Panther in the mail shortly...
Even with the $99, if you're getting a G5 and a display, you save $$$ even compared to the edu discount. And you can pick up an iPod and airport with the discount and hock em on ebay if you don't want em.
I'm saving my lunch money (as a grad student working full-time) for one of those G5's + a 20" lcd...
You gotta watch out for the Asian ones though. Sometimes you get the "Low-Cost Edition". Same text, but it's on REALLY bad paper (thin enough that you can see the text from the next page thru it) and with greyish ink. I got a book like that and it really gave me a headache trying to read it.
That said, I'm surprised this is really news to people. Nobody I knew in college bought their books from the bookstore. The only time I went in there was to copy down the ISBN numbers and buy them online (usually from half.com, sometimes from England). I probably saved hundreds over the last couple years of school (when I finally thought of doing it).
That's typical of PCs anyway - usually unplugging/replugging a null modem from a PC to something else will send a break (Stop-A equiv). So when it went to sleep it decided it was disconnected and poof...
Bah I used to live down by Edwards AFB (my dad's retired AF). As I recall (and I may be wrong), the Antelope Valley down there is the only populated area in the US where supersonic flight is permitted and it happened pretty often there (it's the home of the Air Force Flight Test Center, for those who don't know).
The thing about supersonic flights is they typically fly Really Fucking High (TM). High enough to the point where the sonic boom is just a faint rumble and a lot of the time you can't even hear the engines.
No, the sound didn't come from the supersonic flights, it came from the flights coming in low on final.
Strangely you get used to it, even though they did a lot of flights at night too.
That said, I also used to live in northern Virginia and the Concorde would come over us once in a while going into Dulles. Loud for sure, probably as loud as the B-1s were, but frankly if your house is under the approach to an airport and you have the backs of the engines pointed in your general direction, ANYTHING flying in there is gonna be pretty damn loud. Comparing a 747 to a Concorde doesn't make the 747 any quieter...
I don't have one, but my friend switched to Sprint for a couple months to try one before he can get one that'll work for T-Mobile.
He really likes most aspects of it. Reception's good and it's surprisingly small.
What's really lame is that threre's no way to reach the contacts while on the phone without putting the other user on hold. It lets you get to the Palm desktop easily, but there's no contacts icon there!
And when you finally do get to the contacts, it's in a silly view with all numbers for all names displayed, much like older cell phones. It's fine if you have a few names in there, but if you have a lot it'll get really cumbersome to get to anything in the middle.
Other than those, he likes it so far (aside from having to use Sprint - it still has a "coming soon" when he tries to send an SMS in the bay area, for christ's sake!)
Yeah I really wish they'd figure that out in windows. Half the time I drag something into, say, a word doc, I end up with an icon in my doc. When I double-click it, then it opens the embedded thing in the other app. Now I as a user would expect to see a printable representation show up there.
And as for dragging over the taskbar button - I didn't even know you could do that till about a year ago. Frankly it had never occured to me to try.
hmm well i don't mind that it keeps the library that way if it's all going thru a playlist anyway...
but i see in prefs, in the advanced tab, there's an enabled checkbox about organizing your files. you might wanna disable that (I dunno if it'll work since I don't have any mp3s on my work machine at the moment).
Now all I need is an AAC player for my iPaq so I don't have to convert anything I'd buy from the music store...
Re:Idiocy - bluetooth just taking off
on
Is Bluetooth Dead?
·
· Score: 1
Are you kidding me? GSM in the states sucks big floppy donkey dick.
My friend was in Pasadena last week and didn't get ANY signal the whole weekend she was there. In Santa Barbara when I had GSM I was lucky if I could make 1/5 calls I tried to make. CONSTANT phantom voicemails.
I had no signal at all at work in Santa Clara (in silicon-fucking-valley)
When I had a layover in Chicago I couldn't get a GSM signal in O'Hare airport!
And don't even get me started on busy, yet rural freeways (such as along I-80 cross-country)
Needless to say I've switched to Verizon's ghettolicious CDMA. Low on features and their data plans' price points are ridiculous, but the damn thing works. Everywhere.
That said I have bluetooth for my iPaq (1940) and a USB dongle on my PC. The iPaq works great, but the drivers for the USB thing are HORRIBLE. I was always having trouble doing simple things, like just pairing the devices. MS really needs to release some unified drivers for this (there is a USB Bluetooth Class defined, after all...)
Now if only Verizon would get on the ball and lower their data plan pricing and release at least ONE bluetooth phone...
By the whole "avoiding persecution" argument, I can only assume you're talking about the pilgrims and early Boston settlers. In that case, take another history class (not one of the sanatized elementary school ones), cuz you're dead wrong. The pilgrims had one of the most intolerant societies ever. They came here because THEY COULDN'T TOLERATE THE REST OF EUROPE.
They were disliked in Europe, not because of their beliefs so much as because they we holier-than-thou assholes who were hell-bent on forcing everyone ELSE into their beliefs.
Hell just look at how the Plymouth settlers treated Roger Williams. Yeah, we're founded on some great tolerance.
And I'm sure there are some crispy "witches" from Salem that'd take issue with that view...
I think America's a great place and all, but to say that we were founded as a place free of persecution is just plain ignorant.
Ommiting it doesn't mean the gov't is against religon. If that were the case, us not pledging not to be terrorists would mean that we MUST all working for bin Laden...
And why is there such a need to lead a group prayer in the classroom? At my HS there were independent christian clubs (I'm not sure how the faculty was related - they may have been allowed to participate but not when class was in session or something, not 100% sure), they just did their group praying during lunch or break or whatever....the Christians were happy cuz they could still pray, the non-Christians were happy cuz they didn't have to sit thru it.
I have no problem with people praying at school, I just don't see why it has to be when class is in session. I don't think god's gonna strike you down if you wait 15 minutes just for the sake of ending the silly argument. Ya know, avoiding conflict, promoting peace, and all that?
For example, in your job do you ever look at a reference manual or book? In college that would be considered "cheating". In the business world that is considered okay.
What college did you go to where that would be considered cheating? Your previous argument was against hw/papers. The only time you can't use a reference is on tests (and hell, half of mine were open book, not that that ever helped any of us when you're supposed to design some piece of hardware or whatever)
No, let's take a look at the definition of 'cheat' (from dictionary.com, too lazy to check my proxy settings for OED...): cheat ( P ) Pronunciation Key (cht) v. cheated, cheating, cheats v. tr.
1. To deceive by trickery; swindle: cheated customers by overcharging them for purchases.
2. To deprive by trickery; defraud: cheated them of their land.
3. To mislead; fool: illusions that cheat the eye.
4. To elude; escape: cheat death.
v. intr.
1. To act dishonestly; practice fraud.
2. To violate rules deliberately, as in a game: was accused of cheating at cards.
3. Informal. To be sexually unfaithful: cheat on a spouse.
I don't think you could argue that any of those traits are admirable.
As for your stance on gen eds...well, there IS life outside work.
Speaking of menuconfig - am I the only one who has NEVER found a terminal emulator that can display it correctly???
There've been times when I've needed to run it via a serial console (to a PC) and it's just completely unusable. Whether with HyperTerminal (ugh, that doesn't surprise me...), Terra Term, SecureCRT, ANYthing.
I dunno if it's a termcap problem or what, but it seems like if I've got $TERM==vt100 and my terminal emulator set to vt100 then it oughta just work...
Anyway, totally OT, but I never have much luck using linux console apps if I'm not actually on the console...
Hmm I always use it now and rarely have any trouble with it. It's only become an issue with brain-dead apps that insist on using the old names, but that's easy enough to work around...
hmm sounds like in high school when we used BO to make a lab computer a row up randomly pop up netscape (this was long ago...) to some gay sex site and then start making siren sounds and flashing "PORNO ALARM" on the screen drawing attention to all nearby. Of course there was only one person anybody did that to...but man it was funny to see him frantically try to make it stop (and he couldn't without rebooting...)
As for cell phones, luckily I'm tied into Verizon's proprietary and ultra-expensive GetItNow (TM) Technology, so the chances of me getting ANY ringtone on there are practically nil.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm up in NorCal now, but I have to ask - why not leave for a few days anyway? It's always seemed to me that if you're waiting for a helicopter to tell you to get the hell out that maybe it's a bit late...particularly when most of the deaths have been people trying to get away in their cars.
:)
I'm not trying to preach doom and gloom, but I think if a fire of that magnitude was anywhere near my house up here I'd go crash at a friend's place out of town for a few days. I can see the desire to try to save the house, but I think if I'm in a position where I need to bust out the garden hose I'm probably screwed.
Besides - the laws of physics say that chosing the premature evacuation ensures that the fire won't come anywhere near the house
So I'm pretty interested - what is the motivation to stick around?
That's an interlaced 720x480 so it's pretty ugly even for that...
And once you watch a couple things in 1080i or 720p you'll see just how bad 480i looks. A friend of mine has a plasma (a 1024x1024 one, not a crappy 852xWhatever one). It's still not at native HDTV resolutions, but holy shit...The difference is staggering, especially on live events (it really shines on sports). And it's picked up over a little antenna on the roof (pretty much all of the broadcast channels in the Bay Area are broadcasting ATSC already and probably half of primetime and 1/2 of sports are in HDTV)
The only problem with it is that now whenever any of us try to watch something that's in analog we have to turn it off because it looks like it's out of focus. Yes, this is even compared to the "DVD Quality" directv (dvd quality my ass, it's full of compression artifacts...but better than digital cable, that's for sure)
Well on FRIDAY night, the store in Burlingame had a line around the block. I wasn't sure what it was for though....guess I was out of the loop.
Don't just take the education discount!!!
Sign up for the Student Developer program (on a link at developer.apple.com). Costs you $99, but you get a 20% hardware discount once a year and you get OS updates in the mail. I haven't even ordered my G5 yet, but I got an email saying I'd get the 4 CD set of Panther in the mail shortly...
Even with the $99, if you're getting a G5 and a display, you save $$$ even compared to the edu discount. And you can pick up an iPod and airport with the discount and hock em on ebay if you don't want em.
I'm saving my lunch money (as a grad student working full-time) for one of those G5's + a 20" lcd...
Um...I have an Inspiron and it works just like any ATX supply. Hold the button down for 5 secs and the power goes off no matter what it's doing.
But in any case - it's a laptop. Just pull the battery...
Frankly AMERICAN students can't afford American textbooks. My financial aid factored in like $50/quarter for books. Sheesh. That MIGHT buy ONE book...
You gotta watch out for the Asian ones though. Sometimes you get the "Low-Cost Edition". Same text, but it's on REALLY bad paper (thin enough that you can see the text from the next page thru it) and with greyish ink. I got a book like that and it really gave me a headache trying to read it.
That said, I'm surprised this is really news to people. Nobody I knew in college bought their books from the bookstore. The only time I went in there was to copy down the ISBN numbers and buy them online (usually from half.com, sometimes from England). I probably saved hundreds over the last couple years of school (when I finally thought of doing it).
That's typical of PCs anyway - usually unplugging/replugging a null modem from a PC to something else will send a break (Stop-A equiv). So when it went to sleep it decided it was disconnected and poof...
show me a firewire card for an HP-UX box...
Bah I used to live down by Edwards AFB (my dad's retired AF). As I recall (and I may be wrong), the Antelope Valley down there is the only populated area in the US where supersonic flight is permitted and it happened pretty often there (it's the home of the Air Force Flight Test Center, for those who don't know).
The thing about supersonic flights is they typically fly Really Fucking High (TM). High enough to the point where the sonic boom is just a faint rumble and a lot of the time you can't even hear the engines.
No, the sound didn't come from the supersonic flights, it came from the flights coming in low on final.
Strangely you get used to it, even though they did a lot of flights at night too.
That said, I also used to live in northern Virginia and the Concorde would come over us once in a while going into Dulles. Loud for sure, probably as loud as the B-1s were, but frankly if your house is under the approach to an airport and you have the backs of the engines pointed in your general direction, ANYTHING flying in there is gonna be pretty damn loud. Comparing a 747 to a Concorde doesn't make the 747 any quieter...
I don't have one, but my friend switched to Sprint for a couple months to try one before he can get one that'll work for T-Mobile.
He really likes most aspects of it. Reception's good and it's surprisingly small.
What's really lame is that threre's no way to reach the contacts while on the phone without putting the other user on hold. It lets you get to the Palm desktop easily, but there's no contacts icon there!
And when you finally do get to the contacts, it's in a silly view with all numbers for all names displayed, much like older cell phones. It's fine if you have a few names in there, but if you have a lot it'll get really cumbersome to get to anything in the middle.
Other than those, he likes it so far (aside from having to use Sprint - it still has a "coming soon" when he tries to send an SMS in the bay area, for christ's sake!)
Yeah I really wish they'd figure that out in windows. Half the time I drag something into, say, a word doc, I end up with an icon in my doc. When I double-click it, then it opens the embedded thing in the other app. Now I as a user would expect to see a printable representation show up there.
And as for dragging over the taskbar button - I didn't even know you could do that till about a year ago. Frankly it had never occured to me to try.
hmm well i don't mind that it keeps the library that way if it's all going thru a playlist anyway...
but i see in prefs, in the advanced tab, there's an enabled checkbox about organizing your files. you might wanna disable that (I dunno if it'll work since I don't have any mp3s on my work machine at the moment).
Now all I need is an AAC player for my iPaq so I don't have to convert anything I'd buy from the music store...
Are you kidding me? GSM in the states sucks big floppy donkey dick.
My friend was in Pasadena last week and didn't get ANY signal the whole weekend she was there. In Santa Barbara when I had GSM I was lucky if I could make 1/5 calls I tried to make. CONSTANT phantom voicemails.
I had no signal at all at work in Santa Clara (in silicon-fucking-valley)
When I had a layover in Chicago I couldn't get a GSM signal in O'Hare airport!
And don't even get me started on busy, yet rural freeways (such as along I-80 cross-country)
Needless to say I've switched to Verizon's ghettolicious CDMA. Low on features and their data plans' price points are ridiculous, but the damn thing works. Everywhere.
That said I have bluetooth for my iPaq (1940) and a USB dongle on my PC. The iPaq works great, but the drivers for the USB thing are HORRIBLE. I was always having trouble doing simple things, like just pairing the devices. MS really needs to release some unified drivers for this (there is a USB Bluetooth Class defined, after all...)
Now if only Verizon would get on the ball and lower their data plan pricing and release at least ONE bluetooth phone...
Um why is suggesting programs a nightmare?
By the whole "avoiding persecution" argument, I can only assume you're talking about the pilgrims and early Boston settlers. In that case, take another history class (not one of the sanatized elementary school ones), cuz you're dead wrong. The pilgrims had one of the most intolerant societies ever. They came here because THEY COULDN'T TOLERATE THE REST OF EUROPE.
They were disliked in Europe, not because of their beliefs so much as because they we holier-than-thou assholes who were hell-bent on forcing everyone ELSE into their beliefs.
Hell just look at how the Plymouth settlers treated Roger Williams. Yeah, we're founded on some great tolerance.
And I'm sure there are some crispy "witches" from Salem that'd take issue with that view...
I think America's a great place and all, but to say that we were founded as a place free of persecution is just plain ignorant.
Ommiting it doesn't mean the gov't is against religon. If that were the case, us not pledging not to be terrorists would mean that we MUST all working for bin Laden...
The Pledge != A Prayer
And why is there such a need to lead a group prayer in the classroom? At my HS there were independent christian clubs (I'm not sure how the faculty was related - they may have been allowed to participate but not when class was in session or something, not 100% sure), they just did their group praying during lunch or break or whatever....the Christians were happy cuz they could still pray, the non-Christians were happy cuz they didn't have to sit thru it.
I have no problem with people praying at school, I just don't see why it has to be when class is in session. I don't think god's gonna strike you down if you wait 15 minutes just for the sake of ending the silly argument. Ya know, avoiding conflict, promoting peace, and all that?
I dunno, but to me it's always seemed like the Two Minute Hate, but without the hate (which somehow makes it seem creepier...)
What college did you go to where that would be considered cheating? Your previous argument was against hw/papers. The only time you can't use a reference is on tests (and hell, half of mine were open book, not that that ever helped any of us when you're supposed to design some piece of hardware or whatever)
No, let's take a look at the definition of 'cheat' (from dictionary.com, too lazy to check my proxy settings for OED...):
cheat ( P ) Pronunciation Key (cht)
v. cheated, cheating, cheats
v. tr.
1. To deceive by trickery; swindle: cheated customers by overcharging them for purchases.
2. To deprive by trickery; defraud: cheated them of their land.
3. To mislead; fool: illusions that cheat the eye.
4. To elude; escape: cheat death.
v. intr.
1. To act dishonestly; practice fraud.
2. To violate rules deliberately, as in a game: was accused of cheating at cards.
3. Informal. To be sexually unfaithful: cheat on a spouse.
I don't think you could argue that any of those traits are admirable.
As for your stance on gen eds...well, there IS life outside work.
Speaking of menuconfig - am I the only one who has NEVER found a terminal emulator that can display it correctly???
There've been times when I've needed to run it via a serial console (to a PC) and it's just completely unusable. Whether with HyperTerminal (ugh, that doesn't surprise me...), Terra Term, SecureCRT, ANYthing.
I dunno if it's a termcap problem or what, but it seems like if I've got $TERM==vt100 and my terminal emulator set to vt100 then it oughta just work...
Anyway, totally OT, but I never have much luck using linux console apps if I'm not actually on the console...
Premium service here too, but I got it to avoid telemarketers. But now that we have our DNC list, maybe I can trash it.
Hmm I always use it now and rarely have any trouble with it. It's only become an issue with brain-dead apps that insist on using the old names, but that's easy enough to work around...
Isn't that what DevFs is for?
hmm sounds like in high school when we used BO to make a lab computer a row up randomly pop up netscape (this was long ago...) to some gay sex site and then start making siren sounds and flashing "PORNO ALARM" on the screen drawing attention to all nearby. Of course there was only one person anybody did that to...but man it was funny to see him frantically try to make it stop (and he couldn't without rebooting...)
As for cell phones, luckily I'm tied into Verizon's proprietary and ultra-expensive GetItNow (TM) Technology, so the chances of me getting ANY ringtone on there are practically nil.