Does anyone have a really big microwave oven
I could put my car in for a few minutes?
Hmm, I wonder if a radar gun at very close range
would suffice...
Well, the old "whack it over and over with a rubber
mallet" would work, I expect. Break the chip but not
the windshield and hopefully not the sticker itself.
AHA! I've got it...
A Tesla coil! Put 200kv across the sucker and see
how well it fares.
Nevermind, problem solved. Go about your cries of
doom and gloom, everyone.
Depends on the definition, but generally, no,
IQ does not have a definitional upper limit.
Some of the earlier tests couldn't measure above
150, which represented a "perfect" score - That
doesn't mean that, given a group of people with
perfect scores on such a test, you couldn't
measure differences in their level of cognitive
ability... You just couldn't do it with that
particular test.
Most IQ tests now treat IQ as a distribution
with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of
15. So, although you would very rarely
see someone ranking seven or more SD from the
mean, it can happen.
The Barnes & Noble "Take the MENSA IQ challenge
today!" books, however, will not suffice to
measure such an exceedingly rare trait. But
if you had that "problem", you wouldn't have
posted your claim in the first place.;-)
Excuse me but if you are still running a 16-bit application,
then you are in a very special situation. And you are keenly
aware of that fact.
The application itself, probably. But you apparently missed the
point about the installer... If you can't install your
32 or 64 bit program, you can't use it.
It might also suprise you just how many programs do
still use 16-bit code. A lot of command-line utils,
for one. A lot of low-end games (card and puzzle-type), for
another. Now, you might say that you never use the command
line or play Chips Challenge, in which case, good for you.
But most of us just expect our computers to do what we want
them to.
Now, with the 32-bit hardware driver problem, I can understand
that. But Microsoft already ran 16-bit apps under emulation
since the earliest days of NT (via NTVDM or WOW - If you ever see
either of those in yout task manager, you still use 16-bit code
for something) - I see absolutely no reason whythey would have
discontinued that.
meaning that those with machines that have
64-32 bit processors in from AMD and latterly
Intel can now see what the extra addressing
brings to the party.
...Unless you want to run hardware not built
into a mainstream motherboard with support
included in XP.
...Unless you want to run software using a
legacy 16-bit installer (far more common than
you might expect, even for programs that don't
have a drop of 16-bit code themselves).
XP for x64 has NO 32-bit hardware driver
support. Very very few manufacturers
have x64 drivers available yet. Thus, don't
feel surprised when you literally can't use
any of your fancy toys. On the
bright side, NVidia does have beta
64-bit drivers available, so you might luck
out. Of course, considering the stability
of final-release NVidia drivers, do you really
want to use a beta?
XP x64 has also completely dropped 16bit support.
No more old DOS programs. No more Win3.1
programs. More importantly (as I mentioned
above), no more installers that used 16 bit
code, even for purely 32-bit programs.
I too look forward to running XP x64 on my
Athlon64. But for the moment, the average
Joe just doesn't have that as a realistic
option. In another six months, perhaps. But
not yet.
or PhD-awarded engineer or researcher, is
going to give you respect for a job well done.
But if you think that translates into access
to a new tier of status and esteem, think
again.
Uhh... Have you ever actually hung around with
PhD engineers? They love geeks. They
worship us. They hold doors for us. They lavish
us with praise. They can actually grasp the
units of measurement when we ask them to pass
us a metric hex driver.
Why?
Have you ever seen a PhD cry when the $3k
frontend to their $150k NMR goes down?
I don't think they even care (or possibly
know) the cost difference, but they
perfectly understand the idea "the box I use
to justify my salary no longer works. Please
please please keep me employed".
Your B-school educated manager,
Ahahaha, gimme a frickin' break. You want to
compare an aloof twit to a PhD? The PhD I
would actually tolerate a bit of flak
from, they earned their title. But
a manager with an inflated title and degree?
I will assume, for the sake of argument, that
I have no choice but to help them (since I would
gleefully watch them suffer otherwise). But
as any IT pro knows, "make it work again" lies a
whole world away from what we can
do for someone we actually want to
help. SpyBot? AdAware? Never heard of 'em.
Sounds dangerous, don't run them. FireFox?
Damn, man, you want to get the company branded
as a bunch of communists? Backups? Oh, you
mean you have to re-enter all those reports by
hand? Bummer, eh? Automatically recreate them
with Crystal? Hmm, sounds like a drug reference,
you should sack the bastard that told you such
an off-color joke.
I don't want people to suck up to me. I don't
want people to grovel. And that includes
management. I just want people to appreciate
(in its most basic form) what I do for them - namely,
nothing short of making it possible for them to
do their job in the modern world.
And no, I don't generally play BOFH. At my
current job, I consider even the management
pretty cool (of course, an owner on a first-name
basis with most of his staff really makes for a
MUCH nicer environment). I help them out to the
best of my ablility because I want to.
They deserve it, by treating me as a human rather
than as a number in HR's files.
Those beyond punishment (usually already
so far gone that anything further would only
grant them release - Or gods)...
..Those too stupid to realize their danger...
... Or those who think the enemy of us all
takes sides and will protect them.
The rest of us, the sane common folk, may
fall anywhere in the political spectrum. But
we ALL realize that fucking with "The
Man", whether you believe in "The Man" or not,
will cause us grievous harm.
I strongly sympathize with this poor bastard.
I may chide him for not having his logs on a
72-hour regular deletion schedule (or even more
often, considering the type of sites he hosted),
but I still feel bad for the poor bastard. "A rock
and a hard place" has no more physical embodiment
than an FBI (or "insert your nation's "law" upholding
body here") order to violate your own beliefs.
Why does he have to comply? rm -rf / the
server and do your time pal.
Do you have any idea how much power US judges have?
"Do your time" for violating a court order could well
mean (and has meant) life in prison without your
"crime" ever going to trial, and no possibility of
parole.
The whole point of storing data on WORM media
is to prove that the data remained unaltered
during storage.
Uhh... Perhaps a naive question, but what stops
someone from taking the WORM media and making an
inexact copy, then replacing the original with
the altered copy?
People realize today that the governments
worldwide have to play a role. ... People say the Internet flourished because
of the absence of government control.
Uhh, pick a stance, Mr. Kerry*, you can't have
it both ways. People believe A needs B, even
though people believe A depends on !B?
Keep the UN the hell away from my net connection.
All US attempts at legislating the internet have
failed miserably, and as much as it sound like
a joke lately, the US actually does more-or-less
allow free speech. Let the UN get in on the
action, and we'll have France banning ads that
compete with French products, the Middle East
banning women, China banning Christians,
the US banning porn, the UK banning
violence...
Hmm...
Then again, I suppose that would put the net
back the way it should have stayed - A bunch of
hackers using technology in a way the oppressive
govenments of the world don't understand, for
the purpose of truly free speech and
circumvention of copyrights. Okay, fine. But
no UN tax on internet access, or I'll take
my ball home and start my own massively
distributed network!
* - For those considering that a troll, I
actually voted for the loser, so, take it
as you will.
This entire issue strikes me as very, very
surreal.
Now, I consider myself one of the last
people who will admit when Microsoft appears
in the right, but this time?
MS: "People want our media player
built in."
EU: "That makes them less likely to pay more
for a 3rd party player."
MS: "Ummm... So?"
EU: "Take it out and offer people a choice."
MS: "Okay, here ya go."
EU: Waitasec, we don't like the word
Reduced, it might make people think
they've bought an inferior product.
MS: "Well, they have, you made us take
out Media Player!"
EU: "We don't like it... Make it sound less
like like you've taken something out."
MS: "<Blink> <Blink>... Umm...
Okay, how about <rolls a 26-sided die>
Windows XP N?"
EU: "Great, we love it, what does it mean?"
MS: "Mean? It doesn't mean... Oh, um... It
means Now-with-50%-more-spleem"
EU: "Okay, start selling it."
Dumb, dumb, dumb. Making them offer a choice,
I agree with. Making them actually market
that alternate version strikes me as far
too fascist (in the very literal sense) for
my liking...
And what happens when the auto-save kicks
in and the key sequence is saved to disk in
the clear?
Text editor, not Word.
I cannot stand Word, and find the OO
version (whatever they call it this week) only
slightly less annoying. For plaintext, I use
Notepad exclusively. For formatted text, I
compose it in WordPad then cut-and-paste it
into Word for the final spell-check and grammar
check (and putting any images and charts in,
since WordPad's image support kinda sucks). And
spare me the jokes about Word's grammar engine,
99% of the time I disagree with its suggestions
and tell it to ignore, but on the rare occasion,
it does catch a legitimate typo.
And you know what happens when people use a
random password? They write it down and either
put it in their top desk draw or on a nice
post-it note on their monitor
Not everyone does that... Personally, I open
a text editor, enter well-mixed gibberish until
I find a key sequence that "feels" comfortable
to type, then type it over and over until my
fingers remember it.
I couldn't actually tell you my passwords,
and could swear to that in court without
perjuring myself... "I" simply don't know
them. But I can type them with no problem.
Also, another trick that I recommend everyone
adopt for their own security... Memorize three "good"
passwords (as in, more-or-less indistinguishable from
a string of random characters). Use one for public
purposes (ie, normal websites), one for normal moderate
security use (normal user accounts at work and home),
and reserve the last one for root/admin accounts and
online financial sites.
Now, that alone will do better than nothing, but one
further very easy to remember step will make
each one very nearly as good as a separate random string
for every single one - Pick an arbitrary character (or two)
of your password, and replace them with something about
the place you use it. For example, you might change the
fourth and seventh characters for the last two letters
in the name of the site or machine.
Combining those, you have a basically secure password
that you can easily remember, and having one use of
it compromised reveals absolutely nothing. Only someone
that knows at least two of them has any shot at
all of guessing the rest, and even then, only within
one of your three classes of password.
Of course, personally, I've simply memorized how to type
around two dozen "good" passwords. But for those who
don't feel quite so paranoid, the above works rather well.
The only way to fix it is to completely
delete (deactivate) the page file, then do
a defrag, then re-create the page file (several
reboots involved).
Okay, this entire topic (as it pertains to Windows)
only needs four points covered, and even if you
ignore the rest, implement #1 ASAP...
1) As the first thing you install after the OS, use
PageDefrag by SysInternals. Set it to defragment
at every boot (after the first time, it only takes a
few seconds). This will keep your pagefile, hibernation
file, and registry as contiguous as possible. Totally
free-as-in-beer, and as with all SI's tools, absolutely
rock-solid for stability (and no, I don't work for them).
2) If you need a pagefile, set it to a fixed
size (same max and min). This will avoid it
getting fragmented in the first place. As for
what size to use... On any modern drive, don't
get stingy. Go ahead and set it to 4GB (perhaps
64bit versions of Windows can use more, but if you
actually need more, you already know all
about tweaking memory and pagefile performance).
3) If you have two physical drives, put the pagefile
on the non-system drive. If you only have one, put
the pagefile on the same drive as the OS. Do not
put the pagefile in its own partition, ever (the above
two points prevent fragmentation anyway, and having it
in the same general place on the disk as most activity
will help minimize disk head movement).
4) If you have a gig or more of RAM and don't have a
special need for more, don't even bother using a
pagefile. Set its size to zero, set your "system
failure" section NOT to automatically reboot and
the memory dump type to "none" (otherwise you can get
into a state where you BSOD immediately on boot,
which itself causes a reboot, laeding to another
BSOD, and so on forever). Yes, I know this point
seems to really drive self-proclaimed "experts"
absolutely batty, and they'll tell you never ever
ever to not have a pagefile, but I've run half a
dozen machines without pagefiles over the last two
years, without a single problem occuring as a result.
Quite the contrary, you get a VERY noticeable speedup,
particularly with opening new explorer windows
(not MSIE, but the filesystem navigation you get
to from "My Computer").
The breakdown you are referring to happens
when the cells split to form new cells. If the
cells aren't multiplying, the DNA's not breaking
down.
No, you've read something into my statement that
I did not intend. And somehow gotten an "Insightful" mod for it - Kudos!
I refer to plain, ordinary entropy-obeying
molecular breakdown. DNA slowly decays into
less complex molecules over time, after
the organism dies. IIRC, somewhere around
0.1% per millenium - Which sounds small but
over the course of 150M years really adds up,
making it pretty lucky to find evem a few
thousand base pairs intact at a time.
Eventually, they would have a creature that
could carry a pure T-Rex embryo.
Kinda shocked that no one else mentioned it yet,
but...
The T-Rex, like most dinosaurs and like most
modern lizards, laid eggs.
If we could get a viable T-Rex zygote, we
could almost certainly implant it in the egg
of any larger still-living lizard (monitor?)
without much difficulty.
But after this long, even if we found a
perfectly preserved T-Rex frozen in ice,
it would not have a single viable cell in
its body.
As the best possible outside chance for making
a living T-Rex, we might manage to get enough
overlapping DNA fragments to piece them
together, then manually generate a complete
genome for the beastie. Allowing for that
(IMO, physically possible if not technologically
feasible yet) that, we would still need to get
a few intact T-Rex mitochondria, which I suspect
will not happen for the same reason we won't find
a whole viable T-Rex cell - Namely, DNA breaks
down at a relatively steady rate, and after 150
million years, you don't have many long runs of
it left intact.
No, that is just because some people
think Word is Windows.:)
BTW, that is not a joke, I work in tech
support.:(
No kidding... Wish I had mod points for you,
but lacking them, I'll give a hearty "me too".
My favorite - I have a never-ending war with
spyware at my workplace (don't we all?).
OVER HALF of people swear up and down
that they don't ever use "the internet". Now,
a few I expect just lie about it because they
think I'll get them in trouble or something
(look at porn all day for all it matters to
me - Do your job, don't make extra work for me,
and don't get me sued, and I really couldn't
care less what you do on-line).
I realized after a while what this really
meant, when immediately after (sincerely)
telling my she never used the internet, one
coworker wanted to "show me something". She
then opened "My Computer" and proceeded to
type a URL (badly formed, but good enough to
work) into the address bar.
Totally blew me away - I never would have
thought that, someone would actually believe
that they have "google.com" on "My" Computer!
So, BTW, how did all you Slashdotters get into
my computer? Very rude of you not to knock,
you know... And stop stalking me! I notice
you on my computer at home, too!;-)
Agreed - too bad Apple effectively broke it (the FairKeys
download part) with the shut-off of pre-4.7 iTunes last week.
Hmm? I thought their recent release only closed the hole that
allowed people to download never-DRMd files, not the older way
of actually removing the DRM from files you already have?
At some point it will fail and I will have
to reauthorize its replacement against the
Music Store.
Apple will not last forever, either. It might
outlast us, but it could also go under
five years from now. How do you then transfer
your music to another computer?
Anyone that uses iTMS but absolutely must
run their purchases through Hymn as the very
first playing. This maximizes the warm fuzzies
all around - Apple gets to sell music, the RIAA
gets to pretend no one can copy it, and you get
to actually use your purchase as you
want without worrying about the possibility of
it becoming unplayable next week.
Really quite a pity that we have to break the
law just to guarantee that we can keep using
something we actually paid for.
Is this PearPC screen shot good enough for you? Works here.
Actually, yes, I have nothing against emulation for running a few
programs here and there (and in some cases, emulation does a whole
lot better than the real thing, such as with old console video games).
But "0 MHz PowerPC G3"? I hope it performs a bit better
than that...;-)
Without support from the leading music player software
WinAmp plays Vorbis files just fine,
thankyouverymuch. Oh, you meant that
proprietary DRM-crippled bag of bits needed
to redeem my winning Pepsi caps? Feh.
Actually, for accuracy, I would have to say
"Windows Media Player plays Vorbis files just
fine". But as you can well imagine, I find that
even more intolerable than iTunes. And, since
WinAmp comes in as #2 (with iTunes somewhere
around #6, I believe), it will suffice to make
my point - Namely, even something totally
ubiquitous in the Mac doesn't even rank
in the bigger picture. Biggest fish in the
koi pond, meet a small shark.
and portable device
You mean the "Car CD player", most of which
still don't even do MP3s? Or for more personally
portable, the "CD Walkman", still about 10M units
ahead of the iPod? Nope, no Ogg. No AAC, either.
Hey, I like the iPod. I consider it a cute
little gadget. If Apple decided to play well
with others, not charge more than everyone else
for a given level of hardware, and lose the sneer,
I'd probably buy one. But half a dozen comparable,
cheaper, and most importantly, DRM-free devices
exist from manufacturers that don't want
to lock me in with their own proprietary format
(well, you could point to ATRAC, but I don't even
think Sony itself takes that seriously outside
their MiniDisc recorders).
Do you realize how rediculous what you
are saying is?
No. 'Splain it to me, Lucy...
Working on AMD64 is not proof of
correctness.
Ah, we get to the heart of your error. Proof
of correctness for what? If we talk
about "compatibility with the 64-bit instructions
as implemented on the Athlon64", they yes,
working on an Athlon64 counts as the single
most rigorous proof of correctness you can
get.
Moreso, in fact, than "compliance" with an
official spec. Since you asked me if I write
firmware, I will presume you have a bit of
knowledge on the same topic - How many times
have you gotten a hardware spec, only to
find it either woefully incomplete or outright
wrong? I'd say most companies shoot 50/50 in
that area (ignoring minor oversights - Considering
those, I don't think I've ever seen a totally
accurate interface document).
Work to the spec before you have product in
hand, sure, but once you have a sample of your
target device you'd damn well better trust
it over any documentation... Or your
employer will laugh heatily while booting you
out the door, as you defend your nonfunctional
code with "but it conforms 100% to the spec!"
Assuming of course the issue is Intel's not
Linux's. Yeah, heresy, sorry about that.
Since Intel only released this to try to play
catch-up with AMD, if Linux runs stably on an
Athlon64 but not Intel's chip, the problem lies
with Intel not Linux.
Even if the Linux kernel does have a
small bug that AMD can tolerate but Intel
cannot - Even if the Linux kernel makes
use of a flaw in the Athlon 64 - that
still puts the burden on Intel's shoulders
to work around the problem if they want to
claim compatibility.
Oh how the mighty have fallen... "Look upon
my works and despair" indeed.
And yes, a "signature" can consist of just about
anything you want. The classic "X" on the dotted
line once counted as perfectly valid for
illiterate people. More than 150 years ago,
most literate people had rather ornate
signatures, more like little works of art than
writing one's name in cursive (and often didn't
even include a name).
There are four different kinds of force that
we know of in the world: gravity, electromagnetic, strong, and weak.
Would you care to explain which of those causes
the Casimir effect?
As an aside, I agree with you that a sticker
will not make batteries last longer. However,
if someone else has tested it and found some
anomalous effect, legitimate science has an
obligation to try to reproduce the
experiment - Most likely to refute it, but
maybe, just maybe, to discover a radically new
phenomena that no one noticed before.
Like the shape of the Earth. Or its location
relative to the Sun. Or that rocks fall from
space. Or the true spectrum of black body
radiation.
Most of the time, such rigor will simply unmask
charlatans. But to completely ignore reports of
an unknown effect reduces science to no less a
discipline of "faith" than any mainstream
religion.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone have a really big microwave oven I could put my car in for a few minutes?
Hmm, I wonder if a radar gun at very close range would suffice...
Well, the old "whack it over and over with a rubber mallet" would work, I expect. Break the chip but not the windshield and hopefully not the sticker itself.
AHA! I've got it...
A Tesla coil! Put 200kv across the sucker and see how well it fares.
Nevermind, problem solved. Go about your cries of doom and gloom, everyone.
IQ Limit, by definition, is 200.
;-)
Depends on the definition, but generally, no, IQ does not have a definitional upper limit.
Some of the earlier tests couldn't measure above 150, which represented a "perfect" score - That doesn't mean that, given a group of people with perfect scores on such a test, you couldn't measure differences in their level of cognitive ability... You just couldn't do it with that particular test.
Most IQ tests now treat IQ as a distribution with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. So, although you would very rarely see someone ranking seven or more SD from the mean, it can happen.
The Barnes & Noble "Take the MENSA IQ challenge today!" books, however, will not suffice to measure such an exceedingly rare trait. But if you had that "problem", you wouldn't have posted your claim in the first place.
Excuse me but if you are still running a 16-bit application, then you are in a very special situation. And you are keenly aware of that fact.
The application itself, probably. But you apparently missed the point about the installer... If you can't install your 32 or 64 bit program, you can't use it.
It might also suprise you just how many programs do still use 16-bit code. A lot of command-line utils, for one. A lot of low-end games (card and puzzle-type), for another. Now, you might say that you never use the command line or play Chips Challenge, in which case, good for you. But most of us just expect our computers to do what we want them to.
Now, with the 32-bit hardware driver problem, I can understand that. But Microsoft already ran 16-bit apps under emulation since the earliest days of NT (via NTVDM or WOW - If you ever see either of those in yout task manager, you still use 16-bit code for something) - I see absolutely no reason whythey would have discontinued that.
meaning that those with machines that have 64-32 bit processors in from AMD and latterly Intel can now see what the extra addressing brings to the party.
...Unless you want to run hardware not built
into a mainstream motherboard with support
included in XP.
...Unless you want to run software using a
legacy 16-bit installer (far more common than
you might expect, even for programs that don't
have a drop of 16-bit code themselves).
XP for x64 has NO 32-bit hardware driver support. Very very few manufacturers have x64 drivers available yet. Thus, don't feel surprised when you literally can't use any of your fancy toys. On the bright side, NVidia does have beta 64-bit drivers available, so you might luck out. Of course, considering the stability of final-release NVidia drivers, do you really want to use a beta?
XP x64 has also completely dropped 16bit support. No more old DOS programs. No more Win3.1 programs. More importantly (as I mentioned above), no more installers that used 16 bit code, even for purely 32-bit programs.
I too look forward to running XP x64 on my Athlon64. But for the moment, the average Joe just doesn't have that as a realistic option. In another six months, perhaps. But not yet.
or PhD-awarded engineer or researcher, is going to give you respect for a job well done. But if you think that translates into access to a new tier of status and esteem, think again.
Uhh... Have you ever actually hung around with PhD engineers? They love geeks. They worship us. They hold doors for us. They lavish us with praise. They can actually grasp the units of measurement when we ask them to pass us a metric hex driver.
Why?
Have you ever seen a PhD cry when the $3k frontend to their $150k NMR goes down?
I don't think they even care (or possibly know) the cost difference, but they perfectly understand the idea "the box I use to justify my salary no longer works. Please please please keep me employed".
Your B-school educated manager,
Ahahaha, gimme a frickin' break. You want to compare an aloof twit to a PhD? The PhD I would actually tolerate a bit of flak from, they earned their title. But a manager with an inflated title and degree? I will assume, for the sake of argument, that I have no choice but to help them (since I would gleefully watch them suffer otherwise). But as any IT pro knows, "make it work again" lies a whole world away from what we can do for someone we actually want to help. SpyBot? AdAware? Never heard of 'em. Sounds dangerous, don't run them. FireFox? Damn, man, you want to get the company branded as a bunch of communists? Backups? Oh, you mean you have to re-enter all those reports by hand? Bummer, eh? Automatically recreate them with Crystal? Hmm, sounds like a drug reference, you should sack the bastard that told you such an off-color joke.
I don't want people to suck up to me. I don't want people to grovel. And that includes management. I just want people to appreciate (in its most basic form) what I do for them - namely, nothing short of making it possible for them to do their job in the modern world.
And no, I don't generally play BOFH. At my current job, I consider even the management pretty cool (of course, an owner on a first-name basis with most of his staff really makes for a MUCH nicer environment). I help them out to the best of my ablility because I want to. They deserve it, by treating me as a human rather than as a number in HR's files.
I am really a scared sheep like the rest of you
..Those too stupid to realize their danger...
... Or those who think the enemy of us all
takes sides and will protect them.
Only three types of people don't feel "scared"...
Those beyond punishment (usually already so far gone that anything further would only grant them release - Or gods)...
The rest of us, the sane common folk, may fall anywhere in the political spectrum. But we ALL realize that fucking with "The Man", whether you believe in "The Man" or not, will cause us grievous harm.
I strongly sympathize with this poor bastard. I may chide him for not having his logs on a 72-hour regular deletion schedule (or even more often, considering the type of sites he hosted), but I still feel bad for the poor bastard. "A rock and a hard place" has no more physical embodiment than an FBI (or "insert your nation's "law" upholding body here") order to violate your own beliefs.
Why does he have to comply? rm -rf / the server and do your time pal.
Do you have any idea how much power US judges have?
"Do your time" for violating a court order could well mean (and has meant) life in prison without your "crime" ever going to trial, and no possibility of parole.
The whole point of storing data on WORM media is to prove that the data remained unaltered during storage.
Uhh... Perhaps a naive question, but what stops someone from taking the WORM media and making an inexact copy, then replacing the original with the altered copy?
People realize today that the governments worldwide have to play a role.
...
People say the Internet flourished because of the absence of government control.
Uhh, pick a stance, Mr. Kerry*, you can't have it both ways. People believe A needs B, even though people believe A depends on !B?
Keep the UN the hell away from my net connection. All US attempts at legislating the internet have failed miserably, and as much as it sound like a joke lately, the US actually does more-or-less allow free speech. Let the UN get in on the action, and we'll have France banning ads that compete with French products, the Middle East banning women, China banning Christians, the US banning porn, the UK banning violence...
Hmm...
Then again, I suppose that would put the net back the way it should have stayed - A bunch of hackers using technology in a way the oppressive govenments of the world don't understand, for the purpose of truly free speech and circumvention of copyrights. Okay, fine. But no UN tax on internet access, or I'll take my ball home and start my own massively distributed network!
* - For those considering that a troll, I actually voted for the loser, so, take it as you will.
This entire issue strikes me as very, very surreal.
Now, I consider myself one of the last people who will admit when Microsoft appears in the right, but this time?
MS: "People want our media player built in."
EU: "That makes them less likely to pay more for a 3rd party player."
MS: "Ummm... So?"
EU: "Take it out and offer people a choice."
MS: "Okay, here ya go."
EU: Waitasec, we don't like the word Reduced, it might make people think they've bought an inferior product.
MS: "Well, they have, you made us take out Media Player!"
EU: "We don't like it... Make it sound less like like you've taken something out."
MS: "<Blink> <Blink>... Umm... Okay, how about <rolls a 26-sided die> Windows XP N?"
EU: "Great, we love it, what does it mean?"
MS: "Mean? It doesn't mean... Oh, um... It means N ow-with-50%-more-spleem"
EU: "Okay, start selling it."
Dumb, dumb, dumb. Making them offer a choice, I agree with. Making them actually market that alternate version strikes me as far too fascist (in the very literal sense) for my liking...
And what happens when the auto-save kicks in and the key sequence is saved to disk in the clear?
Text editor, not Word.
I cannot stand Word, and find the OO version (whatever they call it this week) only slightly less annoying. For plaintext, I use Notepad exclusively. For formatted text, I compose it in WordPad then cut-and-paste it into Word for the final spell-check and grammar check (and putting any images and charts in, since WordPad's image support kinda sucks). And spare me the jokes about Word's grammar engine, 99% of the time I disagree with its suggestions and tell it to ignore, but on the rare occasion, it does catch a legitimate typo.
And you know what happens when people use a random password? They write it down and either put it in their top desk draw or on a nice post-it note on their monitor
Not everyone does that... Personally, I open a text editor, enter well-mixed gibberish until I find a key sequence that "feels" comfortable to type, then type it over and over until my fingers remember it.
I couldn't actually tell you my passwords, and could swear to that in court without perjuring myself... "I" simply don't know them. But I can type them with no problem.
Also, another trick that I recommend everyone adopt for their own security... Memorize three "good" passwords (as in, more-or-less indistinguishable from a string of random characters). Use one for public purposes (ie, normal websites), one for normal moderate security use (normal user accounts at work and home), and reserve the last one for root/admin accounts and online financial sites.
Now, that alone will do better than nothing, but one further very easy to remember step will make each one very nearly as good as a separate random string for every single one - Pick an arbitrary character (or two) of your password, and replace them with something about the place you use it. For example, you might change the fourth and seventh characters for the last two letters in the name of the site or machine.
Combining those, you have a basically secure password that you can easily remember, and having one use of it compromised reveals absolutely nothing. Only someone that knows at least two of them has any shot at all of guessing the rest, and even then, only within one of your three classes of password.
Of course, personally, I've simply memorized how to type around two dozen "good" passwords. But for those who don't feel quite so paranoid, the above works rather well.
The only way to fix it is to completely delete (deactivate) the page file, then do a defrag, then re-create the page file (several reboots involved).
Okay, this entire topic (as it pertains to Windows) only needs four points covered, and even if you ignore the rest, implement #1 ASAP...
1) As the first thing you install after the OS, use PageDefrag by SysInternals. Set it to defragment at every boot (after the first time, it only takes a few seconds). This will keep your pagefile, hibernation file, and registry as contiguous as possible. Totally free-as-in-beer, and as with all SI's tools, absolutely rock-solid for stability (and no, I don't work for them).
2) If you need a pagefile, set it to a fixed size (same max and min). This will avoid it getting fragmented in the first place. As for what size to use... On any modern drive, don't get stingy. Go ahead and set it to 4GB (perhaps 64bit versions of Windows can use more, but if you actually need more, you already know all about tweaking memory and pagefile performance).
3) If you have two physical drives, put the pagefile on the non-system drive. If you only have one, put the pagefile on the same drive as the OS. Do not put the pagefile in its own partition, ever (the above two points prevent fragmentation anyway, and having it in the same general place on the disk as most activity will help minimize disk head movement).
4) If you have a gig or more of RAM and don't have a special need for more, don't even bother using a pagefile. Set its size to zero, set your "system failure" section NOT to automatically reboot and the memory dump type to "none" (otherwise you can get into a state where you BSOD immediately on boot, which itself causes a reboot, laeding to another BSOD, and so on forever). Yes, I know this point seems to really drive self-proclaimed "experts" absolutely batty, and they'll tell you never ever ever to not have a pagefile, but I've run half a dozen machines without pagefiles over the last two years, without a single problem occuring as a result. Quite the contrary, you get a VERY noticeable speedup, particularly with opening new explorer windows (not MSIE, but the filesystem navigation you get to from "My Computer").
The breakdown you are referring to happens when the cells split to form new cells. If the cells aren't multiplying, the DNA's not breaking down.
No, you've read something into my statement that I did not intend. And somehow gotten an "Insightful" mod for it - Kudos!
I refer to plain, ordinary entropy-obeying molecular breakdown. DNA slowly decays into less complex molecules over time, after the organism dies. IIRC, somewhere around 0.1% per millenium - Which sounds small but over the course of 150M years really adds up, making it pretty lucky to find evem a few thousand base pairs intact at a time.
Eventually, they would have a creature that could carry a pure T-Rex embryo.
Kinda shocked that no one else mentioned it yet, but...
The T-Rex, like most dinosaurs and like most modern lizards, laid eggs.
If we could get a viable T-Rex zygote, we could almost certainly implant it in the egg of any larger still-living lizard (monitor?) without much difficulty.
But after this long, even if we found a perfectly preserved T-Rex frozen in ice, it would not have a single viable cell in its body.
As the best possible outside chance for making a living T-Rex, we might manage to get enough overlapping DNA fragments to piece them together, then manually generate a complete genome for the beastie. Allowing for that (IMO, physically possible if not technologically feasible yet) that, we would still need to get a few intact T-Rex mitochondria, which I suspect will not happen for the same reason we won't find a whole viable T-Rex cell - Namely, DNA breaks down at a relatively steady rate, and after 150 million years, you don't have many long runs of it left intact.
No, that is just because some people think Word is Windows. :) :(
;-)
BTW, that is not a joke, I work in tech support.
No kidding... Wish I had mod points for you, but lacking them, I'll give a hearty "me too".
My favorite - I have a never-ending war with spyware at my workplace (don't we all?). OVER HALF of people swear up and down that they don't ever use "the internet". Now, a few I expect just lie about it because they think I'll get them in trouble or something (look at porn all day for all it matters to me - Do your job, don't make extra work for me, and don't get me sued, and I really couldn't care less what you do on-line).
I realized after a while what this really meant, when immediately after (sincerely) telling my she never used the internet, one coworker wanted to "show me something". She then opened "My Computer" and proceeded to type a URL (badly formed, but good enough to work) into the address bar.
Totally blew me away - I never would have thought that, someone would actually believe that they have "google.com" on "My" Computer!
So, BTW, how did all you Slashdotters get into my computer? Very rude of you not to knock, you know... And stop stalking me! I notice you on my computer at home, too!
Agreed - too bad Apple effectively broke it (the FairKeys download part) with the shut-off of pre-4.7 iTunes last week.
Hmm? I thought their recent release only closed the hole that allowed people to download never-DRMd files, not the older way of actually removing the DRM from files you already have?
I'm fine with any 'Digital Rights Management' that doesn't, in the course of said management, infringe on _my_ management of _my_ digital rights.
Okay, so one more point for "never"?
For myself... You can put DRM on my coffin. The rest, I'll avoid if at all possible and break it if I can't avoid it.
At some point it will fail and I will have to reauthorize its replacement against the Music Store.
Apple will not last forever, either. It might outlast us, but it could also go under five years from now. How do you then transfer your music to another computer?
Anyone that uses iTMS but absolutely must run their purchases through Hymn as the very first playing. This maximizes the warm fuzzies all around - Apple gets to sell music, the RIAA gets to pretend no one can copy it, and you get to actually use your purchase as you want without worrying about the possibility of it becoming unplayable next week.
Really quite a pity that we have to break the law just to guarantee that we can keep using something we actually paid for.
Is this PearPC screen shot good enough for you? Works here.
;-)
Actually, yes, I have nothing against emulation for running a few programs here and there (and in some cases, emulation does a whole lot better than the real thing, such as with old console video games).
But "0 MHz PowerPC G3"? I hope it performs a bit better than that...
Vorbis is dead
...Just like the PC.
Without support from the leading music player software
WinAmp plays Vorbis files just fine, thankyouverymuch. Oh, you meant that proprietary DRM-crippled bag of bits needed to redeem my winning Pepsi caps? Feh.
Actually, for accuracy, I would have to say "Windows Media Player plays Vorbis files just fine". But as you can well imagine, I find that even more intolerable than iTunes. And, since WinAmp comes in as #2 (with iTunes somewhere around #6, I believe), it will suffice to make my point - Namely, even something totally ubiquitous in the Mac doesn't even rank in the bigger picture. Biggest fish in the koi pond, meet a small shark.
and portable device
You mean the "Car CD player", most of which still don't even do MP3s? Or for more personally portable, the "CD Walkman", still about 10M units ahead of the iPod? Nope, no Ogg. No AAC, either.
Hey, I like the iPod. I consider it a cute little gadget. If Apple decided to play well with others, not charge more than everyone else for a given level of hardware, and lose the sneer, I'd probably buy one. But half a dozen comparable, cheaper, and most importantly, DRM-free devices exist from manufacturers that don't want to lock me in with their own proprietary format (well, you could point to ATRAC, but I don't even think Sony itself takes that seriously outside their MiniDisc recorders).
Wake me when Bill Gates runs Linux on his Mac.
Yeah, some mornings I'd like to sleep forever as well. So wake me when OS-X runs on PC hardware.
IPod... Heh, how cute. Must... not... mention... Vorbis!
Do you develop kernel or driver software?
As a matter of fact, I do. Lucky you.
Do you realize how rediculous what you are saying is?
No. 'Splain it to me, Lucy...
Working on AMD64 is not proof of correctness.
Ah, we get to the heart of your error. Proof of correctness for what? If we talk about "compatibility with the 64-bit instructions as implemented on the Athlon64", they yes, working on an Athlon64 counts as the single most rigorous proof of correctness you can get.
Moreso, in fact, than "compliance" with an official spec. Since you asked me if I write firmware, I will presume you have a bit of knowledge on the same topic - How many times have you gotten a hardware spec, only to find it either woefully incomplete or outright wrong? I'd say most companies shoot 50/50 in that area (ignoring minor oversights - Considering those, I don't think I've ever seen a totally accurate interface document).
Work to the spec before you have product in hand, sure, but once you have a sample of your target device you'd damn well better trust it over any documentation... Or your employer will laugh heatily while booting you out the door, as you defend your nonfunctional code with "but it conforms 100% to the spec!"
Assuming of course the issue is Intel's not Linux's. Yeah, heresy, sorry about that.
Since Intel only released this to try to play catch-up with AMD, if Linux runs stably on an Athlon64 but not Intel's chip, the problem lies with Intel not Linux.
Even if the Linux kernel does have a small bug that AMD can tolerate but Intel cannot - Even if the Linux kernel makes use of a flaw in the Athlon 64 - that still puts the burden on Intel's shoulders to work around the problem if they want to claim compatibility.
Oh how the mighty have fallen... "Look upon my works and despair" indeed.
Do you sign letters with "Please See ID"?
Do you sign your credit cards in 12pt Arial?
And yes, a "signature" can consist of just about anything you want. The classic "X" on the dotted line once counted as perfectly valid for illiterate people. More than 150 years ago, most literate people had rather ornate signatures, more like little works of art than writing one's name in cursive (and often didn't even include a name).
There are four different kinds of force that we know of in the world: gravity, electromagnetic, strong, and weak.
Would you care to explain which of those causes the Casimir effect?
As an aside, I agree with you that a sticker will not make batteries last longer. However, if someone else has tested it and found some anomalous effect, legitimate science has an obligation to try to reproduce the experiment - Most likely to refute it, but maybe, just maybe, to discover a radically new phenomena that no one noticed before.
Like the shape of the Earth. Or its location relative to the Sun. Or that rocks fall from space. Or the true spectrum of black body radiation.
Most of the time, such rigor will simply unmask charlatans. But to completely ignore reports of an unknown effect reduces science to no less a discipline of "faith" than any mainstream religion.