"So where do people get those crazy pictures of aliens?:)"
Haven't you been paying attention to anything the other posters have been said? One source of memories is 'implantation' which is quite non-deliberate. The people probably saw an episode of 'sightings' or the X files or something.
"I remember my birth, it was painful and my entire body felt like it was stinging and everything was very bright white, and loud (like acid?)."
When you've never felt or seen anything before, regular lights probably seem really bright and normal touch, even contact with air, seems like an extreme sensation. Regular sounds probably seemed like they would overload your ears.
Surprisingly, some people who say they were abducted by aliens give similar recollections of all of it. I heard a theory once where these 'abductions' were actually flashbacks of coming down the birth canal.
I'm around your age and the earliest thing I can remember was around age 3 as well. I recall remembering that it was about bed time and my mom always made be go to the bathroom before I went to bed. But that time I pre-emptively went (to the bathroom) before she told me. I remember being proud of myself for being so clever and 'outsmarting' mom;-)
Maybe memory has something do with connecting emotion (being proud) and development of mental facilities (pre-emptive action based on past experience) ?
"I actually publicize my email address to get more spam now, just to watch PF smack it!"
Actually I thought of a better thing to do:
Whenever I get a spam where they have some sort on 'confirmation tag' in it using a URL with my e-mail address, I extract it, change my address to uce@ftc.gov (which is the FTC's spam collection address) and THEN load it in my browser.
Basically I am getting the automated system to send spam to the authorities.
"Besides, what keeps spammers from attending the conference and figuring out how all the spam guarding stuff works?"
A lot of anti spam tools are already open source for easy dissection. Besides, a good anti spam routine should be the same as strong encryption: A knowledge of exactly how it works should only prove that there is no optimised, 'most efficient' attack.
Until anti spam techniques reach this level (bayesian filters like in the new mozilla, perhaps?) then we will be on the defence.
"If everyone put a couple of pages with a few hundred thousand fake E-mail adresses (automatically generated) wouldn't that make these lists less valuable."
The serious spam harvesters would just dump all the results from your domain.
"Of course, you've just had to pay an extra $.20 - $1 to actually listen to the CD you already purchased, depending on how much you pay for your CD-Rs."
True, but I never use original discs for anything except to make copies to play on my other devices. So if I duplicated it, I would have done that anyway with a non-protected CD.
And even if I wanted to only make OGGs for personal listening, I could just burn the copy to a CD-Rw, rip that, and then re-use the Rw for something else.
Of course I see your overall point. We shouldn't have to post-process a product with our own money that's meant to be used without post-processing as soon as it's bought.
Some audio copy protection methods use an extra session on the disc to confuse computer-based CD players. This is based on the fact that computer CD players will read the LAST session first, while audio only CD players (except certain car players that are actually CD Rom drives) will play the FIRST session first.
Corrupt data is added to that extra session so computers will go boink when reading it. This is why that magic marker work-around worked -- it prevented the computer from reading the extra session.
Now a good way to make proper back-ups of your Audio CDs is to remove this extra session. This can be done quite easily if you are using a plextor CD-Rw because the DiscDupe software that comes with it will, when presented with an audio CD, do a bit for bit copy of the first session only. This means that the resulting backup will have the protection removed so you can excercise your home use rights and easily make more copies for the car, ogg encoding, etc.
" Aren't there more people in a theatre than in a cab, in general?
Or do you ride around in those clown cabs frequently?"
That cabs thing was a reference to a recent article where the music industry was harassing taxi companies for playing music in the taxi without paying royalties.
On the way back from seeing The Two Towers, my brother and I stopped at the local grocery store and emptied and emptied an entire shelf of pasta, splitting the cost. (We just picked the packing boxes right up off of the shelf.)
Of course all that pasta went into the donation bin for the food bank. Yes, spreading the joy is an essential part of the season, and oh so easy!
Considering that name, I don't even want to think about the heat-sink you'd need on that monster.
(Note: I believe, although I may not be correct about this, that it's 'European dragons' that breathe fire and are terrible enemies while 'Chinese dragons' are wise friendly spirits that do not breathe fire, so this joke may not be so funny to the Chinese.)
Honestly, I think that StarOffice is not so good of an office suite. I always had trouble using it and it ended up being quite slow.
I suggest that everyone intrested in alternate office suites check out OpenOffice which is like StarOffice without the fat. I have used MS Office products for the last 8 years almost exclusively and I can honestly say that OpenOffice is ready for the needs 99%+ of MS Office users. I am already using features in OpenOffice like Cross-Referencing and automated indexing that I never figured out in Word (if they exist, which they probably do.)
I started my first real project with it 2 days ago (which is documentation for a program I wrote) and everything is moving quite smoothly.
Overall, it is both Free and highly recommended by me. If you want to ditch office please look at OpenOffice!
"I can only speak COBOL, and that badly. I don't even know what danish is. Is it like VB?"
DANISH is like an advanced version PSTRY but you get a much better tase of it you compile it on APPLE or some other similarly fruity platform. It is best learned in the morning with a healthy side of JAVA.
"You could also use the tag, which will associate a tooltip with a chunk of text. HP is one site that uses this tag frequently...as an example, hover over the underlined "PCs" in the "PCs & workstations" link on their homepage. A tooltip that says "Personal computers" will pop up."
This would be insufficient for my previous example because they use a couple of nice little pictures in the help display.
Also, on the Paypal site, (aside from their shady business) they use one of those little popups to explain the use of typing in what you see in the image and also provide a link to an audio version of the code so the visually impaired can see it.
"Really? Care to point out a single constructive use of popups?"
I find that pop-ups are used quite constructively on many e-commerce sites. For example, if you are on the page where you type in your credit card information and you don't know what the "Card verification number" is, you can click 'help' and a little window pops up showing you how to find it.
This avoids the problem of redirecting the current window to another page and then losing the currently entered contents of the form. If also avoids clutter on the form.
"I find it unbelievable that you get pointers to installing the bloody thing everywhere, but you have to look hard to find out how to get rid of it... "
In mozilla:
Help > About plug-ins:
Scroll down and find the entry about shockwave flash. The DLL is listed right there.
Seriously, why are we worried about web ads? It's not we have to see them.
I haven't seen a popup in months and months thanks to good popup blocking in Opera and Mozilla.
I haven't seen a banner ad in months as well thanks to Bannerblind.
I always delete the flash dll mozilla uses so I never see flash ads either. (Occasionally it is required so I use opera for that.)
This is all highly necessary because I can only get 28.8 where I live (not even 56K) and damn flash and other banners slow you down so your surfing is impossible.
Seriously the only ads I ever manage to see are those text ones on google and they tend to be relevant and non-annoying so I sometimes click through.
Re:Something had to have happened ...
on
Starcraft
·
· Score: 1
"Well, heck, how can you argue with impeccable logic like that. And lots of things did happen. Sun rose, sun set, grass grew, leaves fell. Obvious signs of alien visitors. The signs were right in front us all the time"
Next time we will be reading a review of his book detailing how on Dec 21, 2012, Elvis will crash an alien space craft into the Loch Ness Monster.
"Heh...oddly enough, I ALSO just finished a course using that book (just got my grade a few minutes ago, actually...couldn't believe I got an A for that course). Word of advice...if you tend to procrastinate like I do, never, never, NEVER take a design class online.."
What the heck? Were we in the same class? My grades were just released a few minutes ago as well! Were your prof's initials M.M.?
"I just finished a CS course [berkeley.edu] co-taught by Professor Patterson, and our primary text this semester was Patterson and Hennessy's Computer Organization and Design [berkeley.edu].
When we discussed pipelining this semester, the analogy used was the four stages of doing laundry: washing, drying, folding, and stashing. Here are the lecture [berkeley.edu] notes [berkeley.edu] (both PDF). The notes spend a good deal of time going over the hazards of pipelines and how to avoid them."
I just finished an engineering course with the exact same book, and we did that exact same pipelining example. I must say that the books is really very good at explaining the workings of the CPU.
The best teacher, though, is design. As part of the course, we all formed groups and actually designed and implemeted basic non-pipelined CPUs in VHDL and, if they fit, we implemented them on FPGA (field programmable gate array) boards. And by 'simple' CPUs, I mean that the CPUs have like 4K RAM, maybe 8 registers, ran at ~3 cycles per instruction, and only have about 12 instructions total. But it was REALLY informative because it forced us to learn the exact purpose of everything in the CPU.
Slashdot Mirror
Haven't you been paying attention to anything the other posters have been said? One source of memories is 'implantation' which is quite non-deliberate. The people probably saw an episode of 'sightings' or the X files or something.
When you've never felt or seen anything before, regular lights probably seem really bright and normal touch, even contact with air, seems like an extreme sensation. Regular sounds probably seemed like they would overload your ears.
Surprisingly, some people who say they were abducted by aliens give similar recollections of all of it. I heard a theory once where these 'abductions' were actually flashbacks of coming down the birth canal.
Maybe memory has something do with connecting emotion (being proud) and development of mental facilities (pre-emptive action based on past experience) ?
Actually I thought of a better thing to do:
Whenever I get a spam where they have some sort on 'confirmation tag' in it using a URL with my e-mail address, I extract it, change my address to uce@ftc.gov (which is the FTC's spam collection address) and THEN load it in my browser.
Basically I am getting the automated system to send spam to the authorities.
A lot of anti spam tools are already open source for easy dissection. Besides, a good anti spam routine should be the same as strong encryption: A knowledge of exactly how it works should only prove that there is no optimised, 'most efficient' attack.
Until anti spam techniques reach this level (bayesian filters like in the new mozilla, perhaps?) then we will be on the defence.
The serious spam harvesters would just dump all the results from your domain.
True, but I never use original discs for anything except to make copies to play on my other devices. So if I duplicated it, I would have done that anyway with a non-protected CD.
And even if I wanted to only make OGGs for personal listening, I could just burn the copy to a CD-Rw, rip that, and then re-use the Rw for something else.
Of course I see your overall point. We shouldn't have to post-process a product with our own money that's meant to be used without post-processing as soon as it's bought.
Corrupt data is added to that extra session so computers will go boink when reading it. This is why that magic marker work-around worked -- it prevented the computer from reading the extra session.
Now a good way to make proper back-ups of your Audio CDs is to remove this extra session. This can be done quite easily if you are using a plextor CD-Rw because the DiscDupe software that comes with it will, when presented with an audio CD, do a bit for bit copy of the first session only. This means that the resulting backup will have the protection removed so you can excercise your home use rights and easily make more copies for the car, ogg encoding, etc.
That cabs thing was a reference to a recent article where the music industry was harassing taxi companies for playing music in the taxi without paying royalties.
Of course all that pasta went into the donation bin for the food bank. Yes, spreading the joy is an essential part of the season, and oh so easy!
I just unwrapped a fancy Casio "wave-ceptor" watch that synchronises with atomic clocks by radio this morning ... and now it is obsoleted!!
Considering that name, I don't even want to think about the heat-sink you'd need on that monster.
(Note: I believe, although I may not be correct about this, that it's 'European dragons' that breathe fire and are terrible enemies while 'Chinese dragons' are wise friendly spirits that do not breathe fire, so this joke may not be so funny to the Chinese.)
Really? I have not used openoffice for very long yet, (only several hours of word processing) but it has been 100% solid so far.
I suggest that everyone intrested in alternate office suites check out OpenOffice which is like StarOffice without the fat. I have used MS Office products for the last 8 years almost exclusively and I can honestly say that OpenOffice is ready for the needs 99%+ of MS Office users. I am already using features in OpenOffice like Cross-Referencing and automated indexing that I never figured out in Word (if they exist, which they probably do.)
I started my first real project with it 2 days ago (which is documentation for a program I wrote) and everything is moving quite smoothly.
Overall, it is both Free and highly recommended by me. If you want to ditch office please look at OpenOffice!
DANISH is like an advanced version PSTRY but you get a much better tase of it you compile it on APPLE or some other similarly fruity platform. It is best learned in the morning with a healthy side of JAVA.
This would be insufficient for my previous example because they use a couple of nice little pictures in the help display.
Also, on the Paypal site, (aside from their shady business) they use one of those little popups to explain the use of typing in what you see in the image and also provide a link to an audio version of the code so the visually impaired can see it.
Get yourself a mammoth pre-made hosts list right here.
I find that pop-ups are used quite constructively on many e-commerce sites. For example, if you are on the page where you type in your credit card information and you don't know what the "Card verification number" is, you can click 'help' and a little window pops up showing you how to find it.
This avoids the problem of redirecting the current window to another page and then losing the currently entered contents of the form. If also avoids clutter on the form.
In mozilla:
Help > About plug-ins:
Scroll down and find the entry about shockwave flash. The DLL is listed right there.
Now you know what file to rename/delete.
I haven't seen a popup in months and months thanks to good popup blocking in Opera and Mozilla.
I haven't seen a banner ad in months as well thanks to Bannerblind.
I always delete the flash dll mozilla uses so I never see flash ads either. (Occasionally it is required so I use opera for that.)
This is all highly necessary because I can only get 28.8 where I live (not even 56K) and damn flash and other banners slow you down so your surfing is impossible.
Seriously the only ads I ever manage to see are those text ones on google and they tend to be relevant and non-annoying so I sometimes click through.
Next time we will be reading a review of his book detailing how on Dec 21, 2012, Elvis will crash an alien space craft into the Loch Ness Monster.
OK, it was just a coincidence then. I was taking an embedded systems architecture course at a University in Canada (not Waterloo.)
What the heck? Were we in the same class? My grades were just released a few minutes ago as well! Were your prof's initials M.M.?
Make sure you can identify RAW, WAW, and WAR hazards. (R == read, A == after, W == write)
I just finished an engineering course with the exact same book, and we did that exact same pipelining example. I must say that the books is really very good at explaining the workings of the CPU.
The best teacher, though, is design. As part of the course, we all formed groups and actually designed and implemeted basic non-pipelined CPUs in VHDL and, if they fit, we implemented them on FPGA (field programmable gate array) boards. And by 'simple' CPUs, I mean that the CPUs have like 4K RAM, maybe 8 registers, ran at ~3 cycles per instruction, and only have about 12 instructions total. But it was REALLY informative because it forced us to learn the exact purpose of everything in the CPU.