It's not easy to explain. For example, I make a game called Zombie Cafe. There are two types of cards, requiring two reports. One is just a straight output of the table. The other has slightly variable formatting where I programatically turn fields on and off depending on the content of the card. I have to print them as a small 'page size', i.e. 2.5x3.5", in order to get nine to a page. Sort of like printing business cards out of a word processing program only with a more complicated layout.
My main job is SQL Server DBA. I've got the database stuff down cold, but my real programming skills have kind of atrophied over the years. I'm just now learning Perl, I'll have to look in to Netbeans.
I've been using NeoOffice for about a year now since I went Mac for personal computing, and am, overall, quite content. Compatibility with Office documents created on my PC is quite good and I don't see me buying another copy of Office ever. Or renting it, for that matter.
My only problem is finding a database that does what I want it to do. Creating the structures in MySQL or anything else isn't a problem, I can't find something that will give me card layout power like I had in Access. You see, I design card games (www.sparebrainsgames.com) and need to have a lot more power than I was able to find in the demo that I downloaded of FileMaker, and the Access MDB structure is still not among the documents that MS has released.
So for now I run Parallels, Win XP Pro, and Office 2003 on my Mac to do what I need to do. Sucks, but that's the way it is.
I bought mine when it first came out, still have it. I used it to take notes in college. The battery life was a bit of an issue, so I wired up a six volt lantern battery to it. Powered it for several months.
I don't recall having to reset it often. I had a Lisp interpreter for it, that program's best feature was making the system reset. In fact, that was that program's only feature.
Where do you define geeks in your little spectrum, or those who do not like math but are highly computer skilled?
I've been working with computers for around 30 years, I'm an experienced and published photographer, can build and maintain my own computers (he says while writing this from a MacBook Pro), maintains multiple web sites, and is not only a gamer, but worked for a game company that did RPGs (Flying Buffalo, the maker of Tunnels & Trolls) and designs his own card games. Plus, married an astrophysicist with a PhD.
I just wish Time Machine was a little bit more intelligent. I would like a little more in the way of options, so that I could tell it to snapshot once per day, rather than every 10 minutes like it does.
One of these days I'll have another system with a terabyte of storage on my lan that I can leave our laptops to back up to more or less endlessly.
I used to live near Holliman and always enjoyed seeing the 117s doing touch & go practice. I took some photos once from the highway didn't have nearly long enough of a lens.
I hate seeing it retired. Yes, it's 30 years old, but still no one that we're going to get into a fight with has the technology to detect it. They've kept the B-52 flying for 50 years, they could have kept the 117 in the air. But it wasn't fast or sexy enough and therefore had to die.
I used to work for Flying Buffalo (the makers of the Nuclear War card game and Tunnels & Trolls RPG) and they had an agreement with Coleco for Coleco to produce a T&T game for their system. Coleco gave FBI a Colecovision, it was an amusing little game. What was funny was that perhaps our favorite game to play was the Smurf game as it had an amusing little bug at the end.
Now I live in New Mexico, originally near Alamogordo, which is famed for being the dumping ground for Atari's ET game cartridge. Apparently they trucked thousands of the unsold cartridges, dumped them, ran over them with a bulldozer, then covered them with concrete. I wish I could find out where that was, that'd be a cool place to explore and maybe find one.
I enjoyed his TV shows, and I didn't have a huge problem with him being a speech writer for Nixon. More than enjoying his shows, I respected his intelligence and would have loved an opportunity to meet him.
Then I started seeing his NeoCon affiliation and his support for Bush policies that I don't agree with or support.
Sorry, Ben, it's over and I won't be seeing your movie. You're more than entitled to your political opinions, but I am not required to like them or support you.
I used to really like Scottsdale Hosting for their prices, but they posted on their index page that they're not taking new accounts, and I couldn't get a satisfactory (or clear) answer from them as to what's going on, so I moved to http://www.bluehost.com/ and have been pretty happy with them. *nix/cpanel interface, all sorts of good stuff.
For domain registration, I've switched over to https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/. They seem to take your privacy a lot more seriously than others. They also have a very interesting pricing model.
Good point. I've never taken pills like that before, so it had not entered my realm of consideration.
My wife enjoys reading medical studies. I was telling her about this and she was saying that the study that reported benefits for Parkinsons sufferers required a pretty significant intake of coffee, on the order of 5-8 cups a day. I have no idea what that would translate to as pills.
My problems with the pills is the thought of the jitters. I've had medically-induced jitters due to an accidental OD of pharmaceuticals and it was no fun, I can't imagine what taking a dozen (or however many) caffeine pills a day would be like.
but would love to be proved wrong. 3/4ths of my dad's sisters have Alzheimers and all are/were coffee drinkers. It could be that we are the exception to the rule and coffee wouldn't make a diff, but I have first-hand evidence otherwise. On my wife's side, her mom just turned 80 with no evidence of Alzheimer's or dementia, her father died of cancer near his 80's also mentally sharp, and they are/were both fairly heavy coffee drinkers, but they're also Scottish, so that's a bit of a variable.
Personally, I don't like the taste of the stuff, though I do have bottles of Starbucks Frapp in my fridge at work.
It should be noted that this is not Schneier's writing, this is just a blog post that he posted about in his blog. He may find it interesting and noteworthy, but it is not his material.
1. Do not buy from the manufacturer. 2. Maybe pay cash when buying printer. 3. Do not send in warranty card. 4. Don't let a factory rep or facility service it.
If you can prevent the printer's serial # from being tied to your identity, you should be OK. Of course, some of the very high-end printers can only be bought from the manufacturer or a registered VAR, so don't use those types of printers for nefarious deeds.
I don't know about printers, but apparently with Canon digital cameras they will register the camera serial number with your name if you send it in to Canon for service.
Morphy insane? Not that I've heard of. He stopped playing chess because he considered it an amateur's game and not worthy of professional concern. He was an attorney but was unable to get his practice going because of the Civil War and everyone just wanting to talk about his chess. He died of an apparent stroke in a bathtub.
Steinitz was rumored to have syphilis, so he was probably kinda nuts at the end.
because his site navigation sucks! I love the guy's talent, but he doesn't have an easy way of navigating previous/next on his site. I'm sorry, but I'm not going to scroll down and try to remember what was the name of the last one that I read in order to move on to the next.
Someday I might set it up to read it off my blog, but otherwise I'm not interested. It's one thing to have a quirky web site, it's another thing to violate easy usability guidelines. There are too many other good web comics out there that are easy to navigate.
I'm glad he's successful, but I'm not reading his material until he gets his site working in a reasonable fashion.
Nope, though that was the first thing that I thought. I have the original print run of The Tick, and I bought the animated series when it came out and showed her said episode.
My wife says: "One in 30 million outbound photons strike the retroreflector, after they're reflected, one in 30 million of those photons make it back to the telescope and are detected. So about one in a quadrillion of the photons sent out are returned. And that is a record-breaking rate, no other retroreflector laser experiment has come close."
She thinks the return beam diameter is probably more than double due to the lensing nature of the atmosphere, but she has no numbers off the top of her head.
The laser that my wife blasts the moon with on a regular basis starts at 3.5 meters here and I've heard is over 2km when it hits the moon. I have no idea how big it is when it finally bounces back.
I'm looking forward to checking this out when I get in to work, I just finished writing a SQL Server/ASP vote tally/display system for our municipal election next week. I'm hoping that my boss and higher-ups will let me put the code on SourceForge, it's moderately sweet with only three tables: everything is done through queries and two stored procedures.
My personal method for dealing with totally automated survey equipment is to make rude noises whenever it expects a response. It knows if you don't say anything, but chances are they're not going to install expensive IVR equipment to see if your responses are reasonable.
Then again, my former cordless phone had built-in caller ID, so if I didn't know the number, I let my answering machine screen it. These days I'm cell-only, no landline.
There's both direct and indirect employees. A friend of mine installs vertical app systems based on SCO. The software was developed by his employer ages ago before SCO was anywhere near buying Unix from Novell, much less the McBride invasion. He works for a legitimate company who based their business on an OS provider who basically went evil. Now Richard is in a slightly precarious position. He has lots of systems to maintain, but now all of these customers are edgy because they hear bits and pieces regarding SCO, and they know their business depends on it.
Rich's employer sells a similar package based on Windows, but just the two platforms. Care to guess which is the more stable platform? It might have been wise of the company to port their system to a Linux distro, but they are a small company and probably didn't have the resources.
It's not like Rich is in danger of losing his job next week, but it adds to the tension at the office and makes work life that much more unpleasant.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not easy to explain. For example, I make a game called Zombie Cafe. There are two types of cards, requiring two reports. One is just a straight output of the table. The other has slightly variable formatting where I programatically turn fields on and off depending on the content of the card. I have to print them as a small 'page size', i.e. 2.5x3.5", in order to get nine to a page. Sort of like printing business cards out of a word processing program only with a more complicated layout.
My main job is SQL Server DBA. I've got the database stuff down cold, but my real programming skills have kind of atrophied over the years. I'm just now learning Perl, I'll have to look in to Netbeans.
Thanks!
I've been using NeoOffice for about a year now since I went Mac for personal computing, and am, overall, quite content. Compatibility with Office documents created on my PC is quite good and I don't see me buying another copy of Office ever. Or renting it, for that matter.
My only problem is finding a database that does what I want it to do. Creating the structures in MySQL or anything else isn't a problem, I can't find something that will give me card layout power like I had in Access. You see, I design card games (www.sparebrainsgames.com) and need to have a lot more power than I was able to find in the demo that I downloaded of FileMaker, and the Access MDB structure is still not among the documents that MS has released.
So for now I run Parallels, Win XP Pro, and Office 2003 on my Mac to do what I need to do. Sucks, but that's the way it is.
I bought mine when it first came out, still have it. I used it to take notes in college. The battery life was a bit of an issue, so I wired up a six volt lantern battery to it. Powered it for several months.
I don't recall having to reset it often. I had a Lisp interpreter for it, that program's best feature was making the system reset. In fact, that was that program's only feature.
Ooooh! Carry some Scotch tape and a piece of paper, perhaps just a 3x5 card, with the airline's logo: "Out of order."
Easy enough to whip up a few before you leave home and keep 'em in your carry bag.
Or, if flying in England, Guy Fawkes masks.
Where do you define geeks in your little spectrum, or those who do not like math but are highly computer skilled?
I've been working with computers for around 30 years, I'm an experienced and published photographer, can build and maintain my own computers (he says while writing this from a MacBook Pro), maintains multiple web sites, and is not only a gamer, but worked for a game company that did RPGs (Flying Buffalo, the maker of Tunnels & Trolls) and designs his own card games. Plus, married an astrophysicist with a PhD.
I am definitely not in your nerd/dork spectrum.
I just wish Time Machine was a little bit more intelligent. I would like a little more in the way of options, so that I could tell it to snapshot once per day, rather than every 10 minutes like it does.
One of these days I'll have another system with a terabyte of storage on my lan that I can leave our laptops to back up to more or less endlessly.
I used to live near Holliman and always enjoyed seeing the 117s doing touch & go practice. I took some photos once from the highway didn't have nearly long enough of a lens.
I hate seeing it retired. Yes, it's 30 years old, but still no one that we're going to get into a fight with has the technology to detect it. They've kept the B-52 flying for 50 years, they could have kept the 117 in the air. But it wasn't fast or sexy enough and therefore had to die.
I used to work for Flying Buffalo (the makers of the Nuclear War card game and Tunnels & Trolls RPG) and they had an agreement with Coleco for Coleco to produce a T&T game for their system. Coleco gave FBI a Colecovision, it was an amusing little game. What was funny was that perhaps our favorite game to play was the Smurf game as it had an amusing little bug at the end.
Now I live in New Mexico, originally near Alamogordo, which is famed for being the dumping ground for Atari's ET game cartridge. Apparently they trucked thousands of the unsold cartridges, dumped them, ran over them with a bulldozer, then covered them with concrete. I wish I could find out where that was, that'd be a cool place to explore and maybe find one.
I enjoyed his TV shows, and I didn't have a huge problem with him being a speech writer for Nixon. More than enjoying his shows, I respected his intelligence and would have loved an opportunity to meet him.
Then I started seeing his NeoCon affiliation and his support for Bush policies that I don't agree with or support.
Sorry, Ben, it's over and I won't be seeing your movie. You're more than entitled to your political opinions, but I am not required to like them or support you.
I used to really like Scottsdale Hosting for their prices, but they posted on their index page that they're not taking new accounts, and I couldn't get a satisfactory (or clear) answer from them as to what's going on, so I moved to http://www.bluehost.com/ and have been pretty happy with them. *nix/cpanel interface, all sorts of good stuff.
For domain registration, I've switched over to https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/. They seem to take your privacy a lot more seriously than others. They also have a very interesting pricing model.
Good point. I've never taken pills like that before, so it had not entered my realm of consideration.
My wife enjoys reading medical studies. I was telling her about this and she was saying that the study that reported benefits for Parkinsons sufferers required a pretty significant intake of coffee, on the order of 5-8 cups a day. I have no idea what that would translate to as pills.
My problems with the pills is the thought of the jitters. I've had medically-induced jitters due to an accidental OD of pharmaceuticals and it was no fun, I can't imagine what taking a dozen (or however many) caffeine pills a day would be like.
but would love to be proved wrong. 3/4ths of my dad's sisters have Alzheimers and all are/were coffee drinkers. It could be that we are the exception to the rule and coffee wouldn't make a diff, but I have first-hand evidence otherwise. On my wife's side, her mom just turned 80 with no evidence of Alzheimer's or dementia, her father died of cancer near his 80's also mentally sharp, and they are/were both fairly heavy coffee drinkers, but they're also Scottish, so that's a bit of a variable.
Personally, I don't like the taste of the stuff, though I do have bottles of Starbucks Frapp in my fridge at work.
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20080316&mode=classic
It should be noted that this is not Schneier's writing, this is just a blog post that he posted about in his blog. He may find it interesting and noteworthy, but it is not his material.
1. Do not buy from the manufacturer.
2. Maybe pay cash when buying printer.
3. Do not send in warranty card.
4. Don't let a factory rep or facility service it.
If you can prevent the printer's serial # from being tied to your identity, you should be OK. Of course, some of the very high-end printers can only be bought from the manufacturer or a registered VAR, so don't use those types of printers for nefarious deeds.
I don't know about printers, but apparently with Canon digital cameras they will register the camera serial number with your name if you send it in to Canon for service.
Morphy insane? Not that I've heard of. He stopped playing chess because he considered it an amateur's game and not worthy of professional concern. He was an attorney but was unable to get his practice going because of the Civil War and everyone just wanting to talk about his chess. He died of an apparent stroke in a bathtub.
Steinitz was rumored to have syphilis, so he was probably kinda nuts at the end.
because his site navigation sucks! I love the guy's talent, but he doesn't have an easy way of navigating previous/next on his site. I'm sorry, but I'm not going to scroll down and try to remember what was the name of the last one that I read in order to move on to the next.
Someday I might set it up to read it off my blog, but otherwise I'm not interested. It's one thing to have a quirky web site, it's another thing to violate easy usability guidelines. There are too many other good web comics out there that are easy to navigate.
I'm glad he's successful, but I'm not reading his material until he gets his site working in a reasonable fashion.
Nope, though that was the first thing that I thought. I have the original print run of The Tick, and I bought the animated series when it came out and showed her said episode.
My wife says: "One in 30 million outbound photons strike the retroreflector, after they're reflected, one in 30 million of those photons make it back to the telescope and are detected. So about one in a quadrillion of the photons sent out are returned. And that is a record-breaking rate, no other retroreflector laser experiment has come close."
She thinks the return beam diameter is probably more than double due to the lensing nature of the atmosphere, but she has no numbers off the top of her head.
The laser that my wife blasts the moon with on a regular basis starts at 3.5 meters here and I've heard is over 2km when it hits the moon. I have no idea how big it is when it finally bounces back.
I'm looking forward to checking this out when I get in to work, I just finished writing a SQL Server/ASP vote tally/display system for our municipal election next week. I'm hoping that my boss and higher-ups will let me put the code on SourceForge, it's moderately sweet with only three tables: everything is done through queries and two stored procedures.
My personal method for dealing with totally automated survey equipment is to make rude noises whenever it expects a response. It knows if you don't say anything, but chances are they're not going to install expensive IVR equipment to see if your responses are reasonable.
Then again, my former cordless phone had built-in caller ID, so if I didn't know the number, I let my answering machine screen it. These days I'm cell-only, no landline.
There's both direct and indirect employees. A friend of mine installs vertical app systems based on SCO. The software was developed by his employer ages ago before SCO was anywhere near buying Unix from Novell, much less the McBride invasion. He works for a legitimate company who based their business on an OS provider who basically went evil. Now Richard is in a slightly precarious position. He has lots of systems to maintain, but now all of these customers are edgy because they hear bits and pieces regarding SCO, and they know their business depends on it.
Rich's employer sells a similar package based on Windows, but just the two platforms. Care to guess which is the more stable platform? It might have been wise of the company to port their system to a Linux distro, but they are a small company and probably didn't have the resources.
It's not like Rich is in danger of losing his job next week, but it adds to the tension at the office and makes work life that much more unpleasant.