1. Prostitutes will never be the top females in the social hierarchy of any civilization.
I don't think that was implied. I do think that in some ways making prostitution a legal legit profession is a legit angle.
2. If you fly a spaceship to colonize a new planet, you will never have to drive a chuckwagon pulled by a team of horses to get across a babbling brook on that planet.
Why not? Part of terraforming a new world I would THINK you would be importing lifeforms that you would choose to live with as part of creating your own eco system. Machines require high tech and tend to break down where horses breed. Why bother with the expence of importing machines when you can use existing forms of power.
If the issue is over population, then terraforming a planet and just tossing people on it would create the need to use every available resource in order to sustain the population, which would include animal labor.
3. Swearing in Chinese is geeky.
I often wondered about this point. Is this out of respect for the american west who's growth was possible in part due to Chinese labor, or the fact that China has the highest population on the planet earth and more likely to invest tons of money in space exploration to solve its lack of land per person issue.
I'm thinking it was a population issue, and learning a few words when you have a 1 in 6 chance of the random person being a Chinese national makes a lot of sence.
No more nor less geeky then watching someone from another nation saying *shit*.
It's too late at night for me to actually look it up. For some odd reason, I thought 10.x.x.x got reassigned to cable providers but seems to be exclusivly used on their routers.
Personaly, I use 10.x.x.x simply because it's less keystrokes when I want to ping something.
However, your actual choice should be based on the your needs, for example, many items such as network modems have assigned to them an ip address, and it's nice to be in their range so you can check up on them.
As long as you choose something, document it, it's cool.
The diffrence is the cuecat was a spiffy device and a nifty idea. Barcodes are indeed a standard that are used everywhere and it's about damn time that someone came out with a cheep barcode scanner.
The idea of selling easily swipable URLs wasn't actually a bad one at all. When talking to [harrassing] their technical support, I accidently got forwarded e-mails ment for other departments. People were willing to actually pay for the service of easily swipeable URLS. However, they went about it in the wrong way. They should have started smaller. For a fee you get listed, and you get free cuecats to give away for the listing rather then asking radioshack to give them away without the staff being informed what the fuck they were.
This is what IBM did, this is how I got my USB cuecat. New paper catalog and a cuecat for easy no headache ordering. Geek value and something the common man would benifit from. IBM may be foofoo heads at times but they know how to exploit everyone.
----
This Hasbro device is not quite so nifty the 21st century. Unless it have native support for color, has the ability for svideo output (so the kids can plug into the mini-van LCD). Let's face it the target crowd for this device already knows where the A/V jacks on your TV are. I see it as only being kinda cool.
I made worse mistakes before, so I can't really complain...
Like putting down grams instead of moles and scratch your head why you have as much mass as the Andromeda galaxy, and then realizing why they put the mass of the Andromeda galaxy that particular chemistry book just so first year students realize when they make the error of grams vs moles.
I think it was a fisherprice product, circa late 1980's.
[please stand by while I google my self]
This looks like it, i'd have to look more into it. http://www.epinions.com/kifm-Preschool-Fisher _Pric e-Camcorder/display_~reviews#
I'm pretty sure this one is it http://www.thisoldtoy.com/L_FP_Set/toy-pages/3 000s/3300-pxl2000camcorder.html PXL 2000 http://www.jm3.net/pxl/FAQ/index
I believe it was B&W only, I didn't follow any sorta progress on this unit after I saw it first advertsied. I can see on ebay they still fetch a few bucks.
Exchange server offers a nice web based system for e-mail, ok perhaps nice is too strong a word.
Exchange server offers web based e-mail.
Unfortunatly, both Exchange protocal and Mapi are closed protocals that require a license to implement presently from microsoft. This is not to say I wouldn't use a 3rd party generated exchange complient software, only that microsoft has teenage mutent ninga lawyers defending their protocals.
But try pop3 or imap, Exchange server usually includes both those standards as well unless the admin has disabled them some some ungodly reason.
Actually I rather thought the change to flat rate local calls vs itemized billing was a business choice based under the assumption that it costs more to itemize a bill. I'm not sure if this was true then or if it's true now in the computer age, but flat rates make alot of sence.
Where I live, there is a choice for a free isp [www.nocharge.com], pay isps, and a number of xdsl/cable choices. Broadband still seems to be profitable and desired.
When my USR hardware modem arrived, I stuck it into an old pentium, set up NAT, and noticed that my connection greatly improved.
What I was blaming on my ISP seems to have been the fault of a cheap, crappy modem.
My experence has been the reverse of yours.
Upon ISP reccomendation, at one point I bought a USR 56k modem. Connection failed consistently, throughput was damned awful, and in sort my old supra 28.8k was a better choice. I took it back to the store and bought a rockwell based zoom, I and as if by magic the connnection quality improved muchly!
I'll agree with you that connection difficulties may be resolved easily with a diffrent modem, not just not nessicarly a USR/3com product.
---- Back in the day of running a bbs running a supra 28.8, it for the most part worked pretty well... except for users who dialed up using a USR V.everything. I got constent complaints from them the fact that their modem works with everything except mine. I tried to explain as diplomaticly as possible the fact that the only issue my modem had was not being able to handshake with a v.everything, and this is evidence that it just simply didn't work with.everything. The only responce I got was how annoyed they were with the sysops who bought cheep modems that don't work with the everything. Unfortunatly they were brainwashed into thinking they bought the best modem and what I had was crap, and it was my job to somehow tweek with my settings to make their modem work, dispite the fact that the issue was exclusive to that modem. v.everything my ass.
Well, they can put things on there besides music. Weird Al's latest CD Poodle Hat, has videos on the CD. I can't imagine that you could pull that off with a cassette tape.
While there *was* a standard for video on cassette tape, this was a flash in the pan *toy* technology that no bugger uses. The first video on CD i'm aware of was Men without Hats - Pop goes the world.
Videos on CD are not very common place, and this could easily be resolved by putting an odd shapped CD-3 with the cassette. After all, CDs are easier to mass produce then cassettes.
Some CDs have bonus tracks not available on cassette
How can this be?
The limit on a CD is there and abouts of 74min.
There is a limit on cassettes, store bought ones are sold sizes of 60min / 90 min / 120min with a few odd sizes inbetween. It's generally agreed that 120min cassettes are too thin to be reliable, 90 are common place. It's more practical to offer bonus tracks on cassette cause you can fit more stuff on them. I remember that "kiss me kiss me kiss me" from the cure for example included a bonus track that was not included on the cd because there just wasn't room on the CD. I think it was "hot hot hot" as I don't happen to have it handy at the moment.
The only reason to include bonus tracks on CDs and not cassettes is to encourage you to buy the CD rather then the cassette.
Artwork and notes CAN be included in a cassette with ease, though there usually is a reduction in size.
---
In computer world, legacy media *ususaly* costs MORE then modern media. While most people still have floppy drives, the release media of choice is still CD, even for data that would fit on a floppy. The demand is less there for less is produced. It would make more sence if cassettes cost more, acording to many they are after all more costly to reproduce. Cassettes are still popular with people who haven't bothered to upgrade their car decks, runners who find the cassettes don't skip, and a few others who haven't bothered to get a CD player. The market I believe to be small, so it makes little sence for them to flood the market with cassettes resulting in a need to lower their price in order to actually sell them.
1. Factory machines are WAY over-priced to begin with. Existing Linux users already know the benefit of piecing a machine together themselves and how much it shaves off the price.
Ummmm... Whether or not it's cheeper to build your own or buy a pre-assembled box depends on the alignment of the stars, the pull of the moon, and how fluffy your pocket lint is in your pocket.
Not to discount other factors like cost of shipping. This is a difficult one because often the lowest bid companies charge an arm and a leg for shipping.
If you are building for lowest dollar, chances are that pre-assembled machine will cost less. It's hard to say in reality because it really depends on the prices at the time, whether or not you get a deal on parts, whatever what not.
If you are building for quality, chances are you'll pay more.
I think it was a joke, haven't you ever had an assignment for a certain number of pages and increased your fontsize, linespacing, margins etc to make the text you wrote spread out over the required number of pages? I know that it would still work using your method, but I think that's not really the point.
Back in the old days, we use to actually add and remove words in order to achieve the desired length.
It might be popular to dis Madonna, but she has more singing and dancing talent than 99.999% of the people out there.
Ok, she does have some ability to sing and dance, i'll grant you that, though in the studio and shower, most anyone can sound good (friends don't let friends see madonna live). But her skill level is no better then a trained monkey. In fact, I would go as far as saying i'd enjoy a trained monkey wearing underwear then Madonna.
There was an old interview I saw in highschool about Madonna. This wasn't my fault mind you I think it was part of my english class of all things. I'm thinking it was her pre 1980, her being asked why she didn't write more popular stuff. "I don't want to expose my self to the media" she said.
Madonna got most of her fame based on shock value rather then talent, i.e. exposing her self to boys and giving them their first erection. As far as the actual substance, I agree with some of her idologies like pushing the envelope of fem sexuality contrasted by christian dogma. I just have NO interest in her particular sexuality.
You *could* get WYSIWYG on an apple II of all things, but it was so horridly slow that no bugger in their right mind would use it. Not sure the year on that, i'm thinking 1988 or so.
I'm sure there were a number of options during this age that were indeed WYSIWYG, esp among the more advanced systems such as Lisa / Mac, as well as even the commodore 64, esp as we got closer to 1990.
But for the most part,...generally speaking, unless you were fortunate enough to have a decent enough system to run WYSIWYG, you were running a text based word processing package. If you were in an Office, you probally were running word perfect, which didn't go WYSIWYG till version 6.x which I believe came out in 1994.
After all, why bother with an advanced word processing package if you had a dot matrix printer that offered a varity of fonts, and the only one you used was courier 10cpi. Using non-printer fonts was so horribly slow it wasn't worth the bother for anything more then a couple of pages.
And now, the point, part one. What I'm really looking for is a word processor that can take such childish attempts and format them properly. Work out where the author was trying to line up the tabs, and change the space-spaced stuff to proper tabbed columns.
Excel does this, does it very well.
I often use Excel just for its ability to take data and organize it, assuming it's delimited by a common field. Wonderful for adapting documents. In theory star office offers this in their calc, but I have never actually found that option in the menus.
If excel is not your poison... then TSE edit, formaly qedit. it's more advanced then notepad, has a dos version, and it's very easy to pop in macros in order to actually convert data into pretty much any form you like. www.semware.com
On a side note... Wordpad is indeed a word processor. It's pretty full featured for a microsoft freebee. While it has no spell check that i'm aware, it does actually allow you to create documents, move words around, basicly the same sorta thing that sold people on the apple IIe in the 1980s.
Brother thermal typewriter driven over the serial interface and Tasword
I had a brother typewriter but to be honest, I never got the serial adapter for it. It was just too damn costly. If I had, I probally would have started using the TI/99 4a. My first printer was actually a ploter, 4 inch wide paper atari ploter. I was in jr high school at the time, and it was the best I could afford with my babysitting money. School reports were made via printing off two 11 inch sheets and going to the local photocopyer and joining the two segments, or later I discovered that I could print at 20 cpi and enlarge. While this was sloppy, it was less sloppy then handwriting by any measure. I eventualy got into a teletype machine.
School papers need one other important features: the ability to quickly repaginate after changing fonts, margins, and spacing!
Actually, circa 1985-1990, was sorta pre-WYSIWYG. While the classic 8bit systems had "fonts" you couldn't really see them on screen. For the most part fonts were not proportional, as in print was typicaly in the form of a fixed number of characters per inch.
Some printers did have an option for proptional fonts, but this was not commonly used because you had to change your habits like using a tab rather then spaces.
There was NO real need to re-paginate if you just recycled your paper and just printed the number at the approperate point on each page. In fact, you can still do this in the 21st century if you had to.
I was more of an atari person my self, but needless to say the atari suited my needs quite well for the longest time. In fact, the only reason I bothered to upgrade to a PC was the fact that I blew my harddisk controler, and cost to replace it was equal to the cost of a PC.
But needless to say there were a number of features that the PC had over the atari / commodore... after vga came out that is.
But needless to say the only real reason to upgrade office is so you can read documents made by those other people who upgraded their office.
Don't get me wrong, I think the SCO group are a bunch of foofoo heads that really need to get their asses whiped by the court system.
They've been hit by a court order in Munich which doesn't allow them to spread their FUD... again, I agree with this 100%
Question: does this only apply to servers in Germany or does this also apply to material located on US websites that those resident in Germany can access?
While on the SCO level I don't mind so much, but I can see some far reaching implications of this. Clearly the German goverment has some very diffrent attitudes are censorship then America as a past slashdot story has shown.
I'm sure it's possible to take reasonable measures that only specific countries can access specific web-pages which would solve the problem of possible legit forms of censorship aka court orders removing slander from infringing on other countries choice to make up their own minds.
I'm curious though... what is the average usage of a laptop... something tells me 12 watts is not enough.
The power supply to my lame 486 laptop is rated at 20watts. I don't know it's actual consumption, but keep in mind that that it has to charge the onboard battery as well. The same laptop has roughly 15 AA sized cells. I believe each cell was rated for 600ma, so roughly 10.8 watt to 13.5 watt depending on whether they were 1.2v or 1.5v.
Imagine explaining to security what that little sucker is.
There was a time that I carried a alphanumeric pager, and like any good geek I hacked together a ttl logic serial port and changed it's basic configeration. It was most useful going to the airport, this was pre-9/11. They would ask me to turn it on, I said it was on. They told me to make it say something, so I hit the little button and it said, "Bugger off".
will be hard-pressed to get "BIC lighter-sized" fuel cells onto planes, unless it's disguised as a lighter (which aren't supposed to be allowed anyway).
I'm not so sure about that. The last time I flew I just so happened to carry with me a bic lighter. I thought to my self I'd carry a cheep one so I wouldn't be too upset if I had to throw it away. I asked the charming security person if it was a problem, they said no, so hey.
Imagine explaining to security what that little sucker is.
Simple... "it's for my laptop" or "it's a batery". From what i've observed, they are trained to make sure things *work* before they give you the OK to move along. I don't make it a habbit of testing my limits at the checkpoints as the only reason to be there these days is to fly.
the last time I checked on my a7v333 motherboard without a keyboard, it still prompted me "no keyboard detected press any key to continue".
That is rare these days. If your bios reports an error when it doesn't detect a PS/2 keyboard, that causes problems if you are using a USB keyboard. Even most 200MHz systems default to NOT worrying about the keyboard.
Actually I don't use the PS/2 slot on there anymore. It could be my bios revision, but I will say that once and a while bootup requires user intervention. Failed autodetection of the cpu and what not
Besides, you are ignoring the posibilities of just beefing-up your backup battery, which would work quite well.
Oh yea... beef-up the backup battery, add more solar panels, always a solution. Or go with what consumes the least amount of power in the first place, which I don't actually know at the moment because i'm too lazy to pull out my multi-meter.
Even large PCMCIA flash cards are pretty cheap now, so you really wouldn't need a disk, and the [potential] problems that come along with them.
As for CMOS, that's really not a problem. Little watch batteries last years, and a couple Alkaline/Lithium AAs would probably work for more than decade with no other power. Besides that, saving the values is CMOS isn't really necessary, since defaults work perfectly. As long as you have a BIOS that doesn't wait forever for user input (many don't, these days) it would be just fine without any CMOS battery.
Here lies the paradox. You want something older and slow to decrease power consumption, yet something modern enough to not totaly tweek out if the cmos battery fails. I'll have to see what the defaults are on something a more modern laptop... the last time I checked on my a7v333 motherboard without a keyboard, it still prompted me "no keyboard detected press any key to continue".
In order to avoid the issue cmos default booting from ide channel... I would think that flash media drive would be a better option then PCMCIA.
It's not like you couldn't do it, and have it work well... it just seems to make more sence to go with one of these embeaded devices that's already designed to take input via remote anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Prostitutes will never be the top females in the social hierarchy of any civilization.
I don't think that was implied. I do think that in some ways making prostitution a legal legit profession is a legit angle.
2. If you fly a spaceship to colonize a new planet, you will never have to drive a chuckwagon pulled by a team of horses to get across a babbling brook on that planet.
Why not? Part of terraforming a new world I would THINK you would be importing lifeforms that you would choose to live with as part of creating your own eco system. Machines require high tech and tend to break down where horses breed. Why bother with the expence of importing machines when you can use existing forms of power.
If the issue is over population, then terraforming a planet and just tossing people on it would create the need to use every available resource in order to sustain the population, which would include animal labor.
3. Swearing in Chinese is geeky.
I often wondered about this point. Is this out of respect for the american west who's growth was possible in part due to Chinese labor, or the fact that China has the highest population on the planet earth and more likely to invest tons of money in space exploration to solve its lack of land per person issue.
I'm thinking it was a population issue, and learning a few words when you have a 1 in 6 chance of the random person being a Chinese national makes a lot of sence.
No more nor less geeky then watching someone from another nation saying *shit*.
It's too late at night for me to actually look it up. For some odd reason, I thought 10.x.x.x got reassigned to cable providers but seems to be exclusivly used on their routers.
Personaly, I use 10.x.x.x simply because it's less keystrokes when I want to ping something.
However, your actual choice should be based on the your needs, for example, many items such as network modems have assigned to them an ip address, and it's nice to be in their range so you can check up on them.
As long as you choose something, document it, it's cool.
The diffrence is the cuecat was a spiffy device and a nifty idea. Barcodes are indeed a standard that are used everywhere and it's about damn time that someone came out with a cheep barcode scanner.
The idea of selling easily swipable URLs wasn't actually a bad one at all. When talking to [harrassing] their technical support, I accidently got forwarded e-mails ment for other departments. People were willing to actually pay for the service of easily swipeable URLS. However, they went about it in the wrong way. They should have started smaller. For a fee you get listed, and you get free cuecats to give away for the listing rather then asking radioshack to give them away without the staff being informed what the fuck they were.
This is what IBM did, this is how I got my USB cuecat. New paper catalog and a cuecat for easy no headache ordering. Geek value and something the common man would benifit from. IBM may be foofoo heads at times but they know how to exploit everyone.
----
This Hasbro device is not quite so nifty the 21st century. Unless it have native support for color, has the ability for svideo output (so the kids can plug into the mini-van LCD). Let's face it the target crowd for this device already knows where the A/V jacks on your TV are. I see it as only being kinda cool.
I made worse mistakes before, so I can't really complain...
Like putting down grams instead of moles and scratch your head why you have as much mass as the Andromeda galaxy, and then realizing why they put the mass of the Andromeda galaxy that particular chemistry book just so first year students realize when they make the error of grams vs moles.
That would explain the surplus elephents plummiting outside, and no britney spears.
A 500 square meter area got an average rainfall of 3cm
500 * 100 = 50000 square cm
3cm * 50000 cm^2= 150000 cm^3
Pure Water having a specific gravity of 1.00
150,000 cm^3 * 1.00 = 150,000grams or 150Kg
Using the imperial system we have to resort to using inches, hands, feet, arms, britney spears, elephents, and the odd library of congress.
If you are being serious...
r _Pric e-Camcorder/display_~reviews#
3 000s /3300-pxl2000camcorder.html
I think it was a fisherprice product, circa late 1980's.
[please stand by while I google my self]
This looks like it, i'd have to look more into it.
http://www.epinions.com/kifm-Preschool-Fishe
I'm pretty sure this one is it
http://www.thisoldtoy.com/L_FP_Set/toy-pages/
PXL 2000
http://www.jm3.net/pxl/FAQ/index
I believe it was B&W only, I didn't follow any sorta progress on this unit after I saw it first advertsied. I can see on ebay they still fetch a few bucks.
Exchange server offers a nice web based system for e-mail, ok perhaps nice is too strong a word.
Exchange server offers web based e-mail.
Unfortunatly, both Exchange protocal and Mapi are closed protocals that require a license to implement presently from microsoft. This is not to say I wouldn't use a 3rd party generated exchange complient software, only that microsoft has teenage mutent ninga lawyers defending their protocals.
But try pop3 or imap, Exchange server usually includes both those standards as well unless the admin has disabled them some some ungodly reason.
Actually I rather thought the change to flat rate local calls vs itemized billing was a business choice based under the assumption that it costs more to itemize a bill. I'm not sure if this was true then or if it's true now in the computer age, but flat rates make alot of sence.
Where I live, there is a choice for a free isp [www.nocharge.com], pay isps, and a number of xdsl/cable choices. Broadband still seems to be profitable and desired.
When my USR hardware modem arrived, I stuck it into an old pentium, set up NAT, and noticed that my connection greatly improved.
.everything. The only responce I got was how annoyed they were with the sysops who bought cheep modems that don't work with the everything. Unfortunatly they were brainwashed into thinking they bought the best modem and what I had was crap, and it was my job to somehow tweek with my settings to make their modem work, dispite the fact that the issue was exclusive to that modem. v.everything my ass.
What I was blaming on my ISP seems to have been the fault of a cheap, crappy modem.
My experence has been the reverse of yours.
Upon ISP reccomendation, at one point I bought a USR 56k modem. Connection failed consistently, throughput was damned awful, and in sort my old supra 28.8k was a better choice. I took it back to the store and bought a rockwell based zoom, I and as if by magic the connnection quality improved muchly!
I'll agree with you that connection difficulties may be resolved easily with a diffrent modem, not just not nessicarly a USR/3com product.
----
Back in the day of running a bbs running a supra 28.8, it for the most part worked pretty well... except for users who dialed up using a USR V.everything. I got constent complaints from them the fact that their modem works with everything except mine. I tried to explain as diplomaticly as possible the fact that the only issue my modem had was not being able to handshake with a v.everything, and this is evidence that it just simply didn't work with
Well, they can put things on there besides music. Weird Al's latest CD Poodle Hat, has videos on the CD. I can't imagine that you could pull that off with a cassette tape.
While there *was* a standard for video on cassette tape, this was a flash in the pan *toy* technology that no bugger uses. The first video on CD i'm aware of was Men without Hats - Pop goes the world.
Videos on CD are not very common place, and this could easily be resolved by putting an odd shapped CD-3 with the cassette. After all, CDs are easier to mass produce then cassettes.
Some CDs have bonus tracks not available on cassette
How can this be?
The limit on a CD is there and abouts of 74min.
There is a limit on cassettes, store bought ones are sold sizes of 60min / 90 min / 120min with a few odd sizes inbetween. It's generally agreed that 120min cassettes are too thin to be reliable, 90 are common place. It's more practical to offer bonus tracks on cassette cause you can fit more stuff on them. I remember that "kiss me kiss me kiss me" from the cure for example included a bonus track that was not included on the cd because there just wasn't room on the CD. I think it was "hot hot hot" as I don't happen to have it handy at the moment.
The only reason to include bonus tracks on CDs and not cassettes is to encourage you to buy the CD rather then the cassette.
Artwork and notes CAN be included in a cassette with ease, though there usually is a reduction in size.
---
In computer world, legacy media *ususaly* costs MORE then modern media. While most people still have floppy drives, the release media of choice is still CD, even for data that would fit on a floppy. The demand is less there for less is produced. It would make more sence if cassettes cost more, acording to many they are after all more costly to reproduce. Cassettes are still popular with people who haven't bothered to upgrade their car decks, runners who find the cassettes don't skip, and a few others who haven't bothered to get a CD player. The market I believe to be small, so it makes little sence for them to flood the market with cassettes resulting in a need to lower their price in order to actually sell them.
1. Factory machines are WAY over-priced to begin with. Existing Linux users already know the benefit of piecing a machine together themselves and how much it shaves off the price.
Ummmm... Whether or not it's cheeper to build your own or buy a pre-assembled box depends on the alignment of the stars, the pull of the moon, and how fluffy your pocket lint is in your pocket.
Not to discount other factors like cost of shipping. This is a difficult one because often the lowest bid companies charge an arm and a leg for shipping.
If you are building for lowest dollar, chances are that pre-assembled machine will cost less. It's hard to say in reality because it really depends on the prices at the time, whether or not you get a deal on parts, whatever what not.
If you are building for quality, chances are you'll pay more.
I think it was a joke, haven't you ever had an assignment for a certain number of pages and increased your fontsize, linespacing, margins etc to make the text you wrote spread out over the required number of pages? I know that it would still work using your method, but I think that's not really the point.
Back in the old days, we use to actually add and remove words in order to achieve the desired length.
It might be popular to dis Madonna, but she has more singing and dancing talent than 99.999% of the people out there.
Ok, she does have some ability to sing and dance, i'll grant you that, though in the studio and shower, most anyone can sound good (friends don't let friends see madonna live). But her skill level is no better then a trained monkey. In fact, I would go as far as saying i'd enjoy a trained monkey wearing underwear then Madonna.
There was an old interview I saw in highschool about Madonna. This wasn't my fault mind you I think it was part of my english class of all things. I'm thinking it was her pre 1980, her being asked why she didn't write more popular stuff. "I don't want to expose my self to the media" she said.
Madonna got most of her fame based on shock value rather then talent, i.e. exposing her self to boys and giving them their first erection. As far as the actual substance, I agree with some of her idologies like pushing the envelope of fem sexuality contrasted by christian dogma. I just have NO interest in her particular sexuality.
Note I said "sorta".
...generally speaking, unless you were fortunate enough to have a decent enough system to run WYSIWYG, you were running a text based word processing package. If you were in an Office, you probally were running word perfect, which didn't go WYSIWYG till version 6.x which I believe came out in 1994.
You *could* get WYSIWYG on an apple II of all things, but it was so horridly slow that no bugger in their right mind would use it. Not sure the year on that, i'm thinking 1988 or so.
I'm sure there were a number of options during this age that were indeed WYSIWYG, esp among the more advanced systems such as Lisa / Mac, as well as even the commodore 64, esp as we got closer to 1990.
But for the most part,
After all, why bother with an advanced word processing package if you had a dot matrix printer that offered a varity of fonts, and the only one you used was courier 10cpi. Using non-printer fonts was so horribly slow it wasn't worth the bother for anything more then a couple of pages.
And now, the point, part one. What I'm really looking for is a word processor that can take such childish attempts and format them properly. Work out where the author was trying to line up the tabs, and change the space-spaced stuff to proper tabbed columns.
Excel does this, does it very well.
I often use Excel just for its ability to take data and organize it, assuming it's delimited by a common field. Wonderful for adapting documents. In theory star office offers this in their calc, but I have never actually found that option in the menus.
If excel is not your poison... then TSE edit, formaly qedit. it's more advanced then notepad, has a dos version, and it's very easy to pop in macros in order to actually convert data into pretty much any form you like. www.semware.com
On a side note... Wordpad is indeed a word processor. It's pretty full featured for a microsoft freebee. While it has no spell check that i'm aware, it does actually allow you to create documents, move words around, basicly the same sorta thing that sold people on the apple IIe in the 1980s.
Brother thermal typewriter driven over the serial interface and Tasword
I had a brother typewriter but to be honest, I never got the serial adapter for it. It was just too damn costly. If I had, I probally would have started using the TI/99 4a. My first printer was actually a ploter, 4 inch wide paper atari ploter. I was in jr high school at the time, and it was the best I could afford with my babysitting money. School reports were made via printing off two 11 inch sheets and going to the local photocopyer and joining the two segments, or later I discovered that I could print at 20 cpi and enlarge. While this was sloppy, it was less sloppy then handwriting by any measure. I eventualy got into a teletype machine.
School papers need one other important features: the ability to quickly repaginate after changing fonts, margins, and spacing!
Actually, circa 1985-1990, was sorta pre-WYSIWYG. While the classic 8bit systems had "fonts" you couldn't really see them on screen. For the most part fonts were not proportional, as in print was typicaly in the form of a fixed number of characters per inch.
Some printers did have an option for proptional fonts, but this was not commonly used because you had to change your habits like using a tab rather then spaces.
There was NO real need to re-paginate if you just recycled your paper and just printed the number at the approperate point on each page. In fact, you can still do this in the 21st century if you had to.
I was more of an atari person my self, but needless to say the atari suited my needs quite well for the longest time. In fact, the only reason I bothered to upgrade to a PC was the fact that I blew my harddisk controler, and cost to replace it was equal to the cost of a PC.
But needless to say there were a number of features that the PC had over the atari / commodore... after vga came out that is.
But needless to say the only real reason to upgrade office is so you can read documents made by those other people who upgraded their office.
Don't get me wrong, I think the SCO group are a bunch of foofoo heads that really need to get their asses whiped by the court system.
They've been hit by a court order in Munich which doesn't allow them to spread their FUD... again, I agree with this 100%
Question: does this only apply to servers in Germany or does this also apply to material located on US websites that those resident in Germany can access?
While on the SCO level I don't mind so much, but I can see some far reaching implications of this. Clearly the German goverment has some very diffrent attitudes are censorship then America as a past slashdot story has shown.
I'm sure it's possible to take reasonable measures that only specific countries can access specific web-pages which would solve the problem of possible legit forms of censorship aka court orders removing slander from infringing on other countries choice to make up their own minds.
I'm curious though... what is the average usage of a laptop... something tells me 12 watts is not enough.
The power supply to my lame 486 laptop is rated at 20watts. I don't know it's actual consumption, but keep in mind that that it has to charge the onboard battery as well. The same laptop has roughly 15 AA sized cells. I believe each cell was rated for 600ma, so roughly 10.8 watt to 13.5 watt depending on whether they were 1.2v or 1.5v.
12 watts sounds reasonable to me.
Imagine explaining to security what that little sucker is.
There was a time that I carried a alphanumeric pager, and like any good geek I hacked together a ttl logic serial port and changed it's basic configeration. It was most useful going to the airport, this was pre-9/11. They would ask me to turn it on, I said it was on. They told me to make it say something, so I hit the little button and it said, "Bugger off".
will be hard-pressed to get "BIC lighter-sized" fuel cells onto planes, unless it's disguised as a lighter (which aren't supposed to be allowed anyway).
I'm not so sure about that. The last time I flew I just so happened to carry with me a bic lighter. I thought to my self I'd carry a cheep one so I wouldn't be too upset if I had to throw it away. I asked the charming security person if it was a problem, they said no, so hey.
Imagine explaining to security what that little sucker is.
Simple... "it's for my laptop" or "it's a batery". From what i've observed, they are trained to make sure things *work* before they give you the OK to move along. I don't make it a habbit of testing my limits at the checkpoints as the only reason to be there these days is to fly.
the last time I checked on my a7v333 motherboard without a keyboard, it still prompted me "no keyboard detected press any key to continue".
That is rare these days. If your bios reports an error when it doesn't detect a PS/2 keyboard, that causes problems if you are using a USB keyboard. Even most 200MHz systems default to NOT worrying about the keyboard.
Actually I don't use the PS/2 slot on there anymore. It could be my bios revision, but I will say that once and a while bootup requires user intervention. Failed autodetection of the cpu and what not
Besides, you are ignoring the posibilities of just beefing-up your backup battery, which would work quite well.
Oh yea... beef-up the backup battery, add more solar panels, always a solution. Or go with what consumes the least amount of power in the first place, which I don't actually know at the moment because i'm too lazy to pull out my multi-meter.
Even large PCMCIA flash cards are pretty cheap now, so you really wouldn't need a disk, and the [potential] problems that come along with them.
As for CMOS, that's really not a problem. Little watch batteries last years, and a couple Alkaline/Lithium AAs would probably work for more than decade with no other power. Besides that, saving the values is CMOS isn't really necessary, since defaults work perfectly. As long as you have a BIOS that doesn't wait forever for user input (many don't, these days) it would be just fine without any CMOS battery.
Here lies the paradox. You want something older and slow to decrease power consumption, yet something modern enough to not totaly tweek out if the cmos battery fails. I'll have to see what the defaults are on something a more modern laptop... the last time I checked on my a7v333 motherboard without a keyboard, it still prompted me "no keyboard detected press any key to continue".
In order to avoid the issue cmos default booting from ide channel... I would think that flash media drive would be a better option then PCMCIA.
It's not like you couldn't do it, and have it work well... it just seems to make more sence to go with one of these embeaded devices that's already designed to take input via remote anyway.