Years back now I had a heavily upgraded Amiga 4000. 68060 processor (about as fast as a P100 but with a much lower OS overhead than Windows), third party GFX card that fitted in the Zorro slots and let me run 1152*864&16bpp for my desktop. Hmm, getting slightly nostalgic just sitting here typing about that machine:-)
Well, that GFX card needed drivers which were initialised by the OS, on load. If the OS didn't boot for any reason, no GFX drivers. I didn't have a monitor that could connect to the default graphics output...
Well, one day I wasn't concentrating when I did an install. Got something horribly wrong through blind stupidity and arrogance, enough to stop the machine booting. Boom! No output! At all!
I ended up having to get that machine back up by taking my other Amiga and writing custom bootdisks on it. These disks had nothing but the boot bit set and a custom startup script on them (ahh, to have machines that would run that!) that interrogated the drive in various ways while piping the output to a text file on the disk. So, write disk on the live machine, power up the dodo and stick the disk in then wait until the floppy access light stopped for more than a second or so. Then take the disk out, stick it in the other machine and interrogate the output. From that, try and work out whether I now needed to copy a new file over from the live machine, move something that was already there or get more information. Later, rinse, repeat until you've got a machine that actually boots. Took me ages, that did, but got the machine back eventually.
Or how about this one. The boss was going on holiday so wanted an autoreply on his e-mail address. Being a small company, he was also a member of several e-mail groups set up on the server, including the generic contact group. Predictably someone mailed this.
It was at this point that we discovered a major flaw in our mail server - it didn't send the autoreply to the original mail sender but to the account that had forwarded the mail. Which forwarded that message, which triggered a reply, which forwarded the message, which triggered a reply....
We noticed the server was being a bit slow but didn't think anything of it. It's an old machine, these things happen. We noticed a funny noise coming from the server HDD but didn't think anything of it - being a bit slow ourselves.
Boss then rings in and asks us to check his mail. We try - mail program crashes, takes server with it. So, we look up the server log file. What would normally sit below 100kb/day was sitting well clear 100MB. OK, something's wrong...
When we were able to stop this and work out what was happening, we found it had been sending e-mails in a loop for around 48 hours, averaging around 3 per second. Yeah, it crashed.
(Scary thing: Someone once forgot to turn off a group membership and did the same to an account that was set to forward to a webmail box. Thankfully not for very long but we weren't popular with the provider and had to talk sweetly to get ourselves taken off the spammers list...)
Final example: Boss couldn't remember the password to his NT laptop, hadn't used that one for a while. We'd tried getting the SAM file and cracking but when the fastest machine we could dedicate to this had managed 3% in a weekend we realised that wasn't viable. So, a colleague decided to sit at the keyboard and manually try as many passwords as he could think of to get in. NT doesn't appear to have any exponentially increasing timelock to protect against this so that's a viable attack. Miracle of miracles, within 10 minutes he gets in! Stupidity overtakes me and for some reason I still don't quite understand, I decided it was then necessary to confirm he had the right password, so logged back out. No, I can't think why either. It's at this point that he reveals he'd been guessing and typing so fast he hasn't got any clue what password actually got him in.........
We got back eventually. I went and hid from him, apologising profusely.
You're stumped there, sure, but you're _not_ stumped for retailers.
We know Wal-mart pay absurdly low wages. We know they put very heavy pressure on suppliers to keep the prices low, often below what the producers can realistically stand. We know they'll only stock items that fit in with their moral code, hence cause all sorts of problems for musicians by requiring censored versions of songs or flat out refusing to stock some items.
So why continue to shop there? They're a nasty company doing no good to the community, their suppliers, their staff or you, ultimately. They bought out ASDA over here and, as a consequence, I will never shop in an ASDA unless it's absolutely required of me.
Attack the targets you can. Support retailers who don't require the government to subsidise their wage bill and who trade fairly by paying a fair market price for their products.
* Nokia are a European company * Europe uses GSM _exclusively_ * The EU has a larger population than the USA and much higher cellphone coverage * Over here we have 'pay as you go' plans - no monthly fees, just pay for the calls. Sure, the call charges are higher, but it's definitely better for light users and very easy for parents to control what their kids can spend. We also don't have to pay to receive calls.
IMO it's a silly idea because it's a ropey form factor for a console and has a significantly higher cost than a GBA SP and an average kid-spec phone like a Nokia 3310. Doesn't help that you have to remove batteries to change games or that the GBA was already there with a much bigger library, but I reckon the first two would kill it anyway.
Ahh, note this is more signing up for polls that way then responding based on invitations. It's difficult to know the size of their sample sets precisely but I've certainly been asked detailed product planning questions before, or detailed political opinion polls. They sure as heck aren't just being dumped to a marketing database by the 10,000.
Anyway, most of the time it's not traceable to anything more than my area and rough demographic, and any influence is better than none. I'm happy with my side of the bargain.
I do. I also distribute leaflets, put up posters in my windows whenever I'm asked and am a party member.
There's a bunch more stuff they can ask about, though, which it's rather harder to quantify by other channels. I've been asked before what my opinion of in-development products is and what I'd consider paying for them. I can't give them that data by voting or buying the items, by very definition.
BTW, if anyone from DaimlerChrysler is reading this thread, I _love_ the Jeep Compass concept and would buy one with minor styling tweaks and a proper engine (read: not that underpowered 3.7 V6 you're talking about). I think it stinks that there's a projected price for the UK nearly double that for the US, though.
I _want_ the world to reflect my tastes. I want companies to introduce products that match what I want, I want my favourite TV programs to get more airtime, I want my political positions to be listened to and regarded as significant.
Opinion polls are an excellent way to do this. I've not been invited to participate in any number by phone but have several by e-mail or banner ads. Unless it's simply not possible for me to participate for some reason, I _will_ complete the poll. Yes, it's a small contribution but it's another point in their dataset and it corresponds to _me_ and helps drag data towards me just a little.
I won't participate in loyalty card schemes because I don't like the data density they're building up and don't think many shoppers appreciate quite how much data is being stored on exactly what they do and what can be done with it. Polls are rather different though - it's upgront about what's being gathered and due to the different nature of the data, has rather less nefarious possibilities for data mining. Net result I'm absolutely fine with giving them data to help swing towards me. After all, if I've got the chance to help steer the world towards what I want and I _can_ take it, why shouldn't I?
I've been in IT too long. I look at that and instinctively expect to find a Mac-enthusiast who's decorated a particular piece of hardware in an unusual fashion...
Thanks, and I know just what you mean. Both Outlook and OE are just really, really poor in so many ways - and both have nice features the other is missing!
Whoever wrote them really needs a good talking to. Twits of the highest order.
Not quite sure I follow you but if I do then yes, a bit but not quite.
I _want_ people watching the presentation carefully. If I hand out notes at the beginning with complete transcripts then people switch off from listening to what I say, which will normally include ad-libs based on what I'm getting from the audience. I'll make it relevant to them, stress the details they need and take questions at any point.
All of which is severely limited by handouts appearing right at the start of the process.
1) Your audience don't have to remember everything that you say. If you're getting complex points across, leaving something on screen that gives people the headline to what you're actually saying helps them remember it. 2) Some points can't be usefully conveyed graphically. By putting headlines on the screen while you explain the points in detail, you give the audience something relevant to watch rather than leaving up the last picture and distracting them. 3) Not everyone needs the detail. If you write the text and speak the detail, those who need it can get it while those who don't can still have a rough idea what you're saying, which is all they need.
Your Ph.D students clearly aren't doing this right - but there are many points where text is absolutely the way to go. And while I agree you shouldn't normally use a data table as part of a presentation, if there's that volume of data to get through would you _really_ advocate reading it instead? Far better to stick a table on screen and let the delegates see the overview properly themselves.
Some things you can handle with diagrams and illustrations, sure. Some things are worse than useless presented diagramattically. At which point you need to explain what you're talking about using plain, simple English as a series of points.
Try and do all PowerPoint presentations with graphics explaining every slide and you'll have confused delegates.
I've got an old, mechanical SLR too and I have to take issue on the climate point. FWIW it's rather older and more basic than yours - Zenith EM. Thunks beautifully on the shutter though:-)
Yes, there's nothing electrical at all to fail - even the light meter doesn't need a battery. It's not TTL mind you so it's rather less useful. One very significant problem, though, is that the body is all _metal_. It's uncomfortable to use in cold weather and would be flat out dangerous in conditions that cold.
More modern cameras seem to at least have plastic buttons - definitely preferable.
That's a very unlikely update - 500 pretty much replaced the 1000... He probably went to a 2000.
The 1000 is likely to have been picked simply because it was the first Amiga. It was the one that made jaws drop with what could be done in a home computer and started it all off. The 500 was just a cheaper, smaller 1000 with a ROM bootloader and different expansion slots.
Yes, but these are supposed to be portable. How are you going to use a wireless keyboard with one? Prop the machine up somehow to stop it falling over?
How the record companies haven't recognised this yet is utterly beyond me...
Let's face it, much of the target market for much of the music is kids (well, 16s) - a group with a fairly low disposable income. So, what they need is to treat kids as a loss-leader to get them hooked, then reap the rewards in later years as they go back and buy the collection.
All through teenage years I listened to a _lot_ of music - much of which was either borrowed or copied. I can probably name 15-20 bands who I'd have probably forgotten about had I not been able to copy the music and probably in the region of 40-50 albums I wouldn't now have as a result.
Guess what? I'm now 24 and music is my biggest recreational outlay. I make them an absolute fortune, and one they wouldn't have got if I hadn't been able to copy it as a kid. And guess what then happens? I pass CDs on to friends! I'm almost the local library for my friends, lending them stuff either on request or because I think they'll like it. I'll get really evangelistic about a good album, telling everyone they should buy it and trying to press it into their hands to listen to it. Some will have bought music as a result of this. I'll also rummage through their music collections and there's more than a few CDs I own that I wouldn't have considered without having been introduced through friends.
The music industry needs people like me to make money - we're their biggest consumers and a pretty effective sales force. Annoy me, stop me copying my music to my computer and they'll lose out, badly. OK, we're after the _good_ stuff not just what we've been told to like, but that's a small price to pay.
No, but one would hope that any journalist picking up stories from Slashdot would notice that SCO's claims have been consistently rubbished very, very quickly here. Any journalist who wasn't is deserving of firing and quickly.
Yes, there are stupid investors who are just asking to get burnt and badly. But in this case you're assuming they're reading Slashdot, taking the headlines only, missing the point of them and not even reading the top paragraph. I very sincerely doubt any quantity of SCO stock has been bought by people as a result of reading Slashdot stories, because they're tending to emphasise how this is really just a house of cards and that that price _will_ collapse as soon as the legal wheels finally start turning.
For a site that tends to have a fairly strong campaigning ethos, what about ethical investing?
There isn't a hope of me investing in SCO, full stop. Until they start playing nice and not just shouting at people to try and scare them, they are permanently off-radar.
Slashdot Mirror
Years back now I had a heavily upgraded Amiga 4000. 68060 processor (about as fast as a P100 but with a much lower OS overhead than Windows), third party GFX card that fitted in the Zorro slots and let me run 1152*864&16bpp for my desktop. Hmm, getting slightly nostalgic just sitting here typing about that machine :-)
Well, that GFX card needed drivers which were initialised by the OS, on load. If the OS didn't boot for any reason, no GFX drivers. I didn't have a monitor that could connect to the default graphics output...
Well, one day I wasn't concentrating when I did an install. Got something horribly wrong through blind stupidity and arrogance, enough to stop the machine booting. Boom! No output! At all!
I ended up having to get that machine back up by taking my other Amiga and writing custom bootdisks on it. These disks had nothing but the boot bit set and a custom startup script on them (ahh, to have machines that would run that!) that interrogated the drive in various ways while piping the output to a text file on the disk. So, write disk on the live machine, power up the dodo and stick the disk in then wait until the floppy access light stopped for more than a second or so. Then take the disk out, stick it in the other machine and interrogate the output. From that, try and work out whether I now needed to copy a new file over from the live machine, move something that was already there or get more information. Later, rinse, repeat until you've got a machine that actually boots. Took me ages, that did, but got the machine back eventually.
Or how about this one. The boss was going on holiday so wanted an autoreply on his e-mail address. Being a small company, he was also a member of several e-mail groups set up on the server, including the generic contact group. Predictably someone mailed this.
It was at this point that we discovered a major flaw in our mail server - it didn't send the autoreply to the original mail sender but to the account that had forwarded the mail. Which forwarded that message, which triggered a reply, which forwarded the message, which triggered a reply....
We noticed the server was being a bit slow but didn't think anything of it. It's an old machine, these things happen. We noticed a funny noise coming from the server HDD but didn't think anything of it - being a bit slow ourselves.
Boss then rings in and asks us to check his mail. We try - mail program crashes, takes server with it. So, we look up the server log file. What would normally sit below 100kb/day was sitting well clear 100MB. OK, something's wrong...
When we were able to stop this and work out what was happening, we found it had been sending e-mails in a loop for around 48 hours, averaging around 3 per second. Yeah, it crashed.
(Scary thing: Someone once forgot to turn off a group membership and did the same to an account that was set to forward to a webmail box. Thankfully not for very long but we weren't popular with the provider and had to talk sweetly to get ourselves taken off the spammers list...)
Final example: Boss couldn't remember the password to his NT laptop, hadn't used that one for a while. We'd tried getting the SAM file and cracking but when the fastest machine we could dedicate to this had managed 3% in a weekend we realised that wasn't viable. So, a colleague decided to sit at the keyboard and manually try as many passwords as he could think of to get in. NT doesn't appear to have any exponentially increasing timelock to protect against this so that's a viable attack. Miracle of miracles, within 10 minutes he gets in! Stupidity overtakes me and for some reason I still don't quite understand, I decided it was then necessary to confirm he had the right password, so logged back out. No, I can't think why either. It's at this point that he reveals he'd been guessing and typing so fast he hasn't got any clue what password actually got him in.........
We got back eventually. I went and hid from him, apologising profusely.
Cache hits are what you want. It's cache misses that kill performance.
You're stumped there, sure, but you're _not_ stumped for retailers.
We know Wal-mart pay absurdly low wages. We know they put very heavy pressure on suppliers to keep the prices low, often below what the producers can realistically stand. We know they'll only stock items that fit in with their moral code, hence cause all sorts of problems for musicians by requiring censored versions of songs or flat out refusing to stock some items.
So why continue to shop there? They're a nasty company doing no good to the community, their suppliers, their staff or you, ultimately. They bought out ASDA over here and, as a consequence, I will never shop in an ASDA unless it's absolutely required of me.
Attack the targets you can. Support retailers who don't require the government to subsidise their wage bill and who trade fairly by paying a fair market price for their products.
* Nokia are a European company
* Europe uses GSM _exclusively_
* The EU has a larger population than the USA and much higher cellphone coverage
* Over here we have 'pay as you go' plans - no monthly fees, just pay for the calls. Sure, the call charges are higher, but it's definitely better for light users and very easy for parents to control what their kids can spend. We also don't have to pay to receive calls.
IMO it's a silly idea because it's a ropey form factor for a console and has a significantly higher cost than a GBA SP and an average kid-spec phone like a Nokia 3310. Doesn't help that you have to remove batteries to change games or that the GBA was already there with a much bigger library, but I reckon the first two would kill it anyway.
Ahh, note this is more signing up for polls that way then responding based on invitations. It's difficult to know the size of their sample sets precisely but I've certainly been asked detailed product planning questions before, or detailed political opinion polls. They sure as heck aren't just being dumped to a marketing database by the 10,000.
Anyway, most of the time it's not traceable to anything more than my area and rough demographic, and any influence is better than none. I'm happy with my side of the bargain.
I do. I also distribute leaflets, put up posters in my windows whenever I'm asked and am a party member.
There's a bunch more stuff they can ask about, though, which it's rather harder to quantify by other channels. I've been asked before what my opinion of in-development products is and what I'd consider paying for them. I can't give them that data by voting or buying the items, by very definition.
BTW, if anyone from DaimlerChrysler is reading this thread, I _love_ the Jeep Compass concept and would buy one with minor styling tweaks and a proper engine (read: not that underpowered 3.7 V6 you're talking about). I think it stinks that there's a projected price for the UK nearly double that for the US, though.
I _want_ the world to reflect my tastes. I want companies to introduce products that match what I want, I want my favourite TV programs to get more airtime, I want my political positions to be listened to and regarded as significant.
Opinion polls are an excellent way to do this. I've not been invited to participate in any number by phone but have several by e-mail or banner ads. Unless it's simply not possible for me to participate for some reason, I _will_ complete the poll. Yes, it's a small contribution but it's another point in their dataset and it corresponds to _me_ and helps drag data towards me just a little.
I won't participate in loyalty card schemes because I don't like the data density they're building up and don't think many shoppers appreciate quite how much data is being stored on exactly what they do and what can be done with it. Polls are rather different though - it's upgront about what's being gathered and due to the different nature of the data, has rather less nefarious possibilities for data mining. Net result I'm absolutely fine with giving them data to help swing towards me. After all, if I've got the chance to help steer the world towards what I want and I _can_ take it, why shouldn't I?
I've been in IT too long. I look at that and instinctively expect to find a Mac-enthusiast who's decorated a particular piece of hardware in an unusual fashion...
Thanks, and I know just what you mean. Both Outlook and OE are just really, really poor in so many ways - and both have nice features the other is missing!
Whoever wrote them really needs a good talking to. Twits of the highest order.
So did Netscape 4. Can't remember about Moz and don't have the mail client installed on this machine to check.
It wasn't absolutely reliable but worked fine most of the time.
Not quite sure I follow you but if I do then yes, a bit but not quite.
I _want_ people watching the presentation carefully. If I hand out notes at the beginning with complete transcripts then people switch off from listening to what I say, which will normally include ad-libs based on what I'm getting from the audience. I'll make it relevant to them, stress the details they need and take questions at any point.
All of which is severely limited by handouts appearing right at the start of the process.
My apologies, misread part of your post.
Text can be good, though, because:
1) Your audience don't have to remember everything that you say. If you're getting complex points across, leaving something on screen that gives people the headline to what you're actually saying helps them remember it.
2) Some points can't be usefully conveyed graphically. By putting headlines on the screen while you explain the points in detail, you give the audience something relevant to watch rather than leaving up the last picture and distracting them.
3) Not everyone needs the detail. If you write the text and speak the detail, those who need it can get it while those who don't can still have a rough idea what you're saying, which is all they need.
Your Ph.D students clearly aren't doing this right - but there are many points where text is absolutely the way to go. And while I agree you shouldn't normally use a data table as part of a presentation, if there's that volume of data to get through would you _really_ advocate reading it instead? Far better to stick a table on screen and let the delegates see the overview properly themselves.
I take it you've never done a presentation...
Some things you can handle with diagrams and illustrations, sure. Some things are worse than useless presented diagramattically. At which point you need to explain what you're talking about using plain, simple English as a series of points.
Try and do all PowerPoint presentations with graphics explaining every slide and you'll have confused delegates.
I've got an old, mechanical SLR too and I have to take issue on the climate point. FWIW it's rather older and more basic than yours - Zenith EM. Thunks beautifully on the shutter though :-)
Yes, there's nothing electrical at all to fail - even the light meter doesn't need a battery. It's not TTL mind you so it's rather less useful. One very significant problem, though, is that the body is all _metal_. It's uncomfortable to use in cold weather and would be flat out dangerous in conditions that cold.
More modern cameras seem to at least have plastic buttons - definitely preferable.
That's a very unlikely update - 500 pretty much replaced the 1000... He probably went to a 2000.
The 1000 is likely to have been picked simply because it was the first Amiga. It was the one that made jaws drop with what could be done in a home computer and started it all off. The 500 was just a cheaper, smaller 1000 with a ROM bootloader and different expansion slots.
:-)
In my defence the article was down when I posted it and I _do_ like that joke...
In C++, you can see your friends' privates.
A policeman pulls Werner Heisenberg over.
"Do you know how fast you were going?" the policeman asks.
"No, but I know exactly where I was!" replies Heisenberg.
Yes, but these are supposed to be portable. How are you going to use a wireless keyboard with one? Prop the machine up somehow to stop it falling over?
Wasn't Cisco initially funded by maxing out the founders' credit cards?
How the record companies haven't recognised this yet is utterly beyond me...
Let's face it, much of the target market for much of the music is kids (well, 16s) - a group with a fairly low disposable income. So, what they need is to treat kids as a loss-leader to get them hooked, then reap the rewards in later years as they go back and buy the collection.
All through teenage years I listened to a _lot_ of music - much of which was either borrowed or copied. I can probably name 15-20 bands who I'd have probably forgotten about had I not been able to copy the music and probably in the region of 40-50 albums I wouldn't now have as a result.
Guess what? I'm now 24 and music is my biggest recreational outlay. I make them an absolute fortune, and one they wouldn't have got if I hadn't been able to copy it as a kid. And guess what then happens? I pass CDs on to friends! I'm almost the local library for my friends, lending them stuff either on request or because I think they'll like it. I'll get really evangelistic about a good album, telling everyone they should buy it and trying to press it into their hands to listen to it. Some will have bought music as a result of this. I'll also rummage through their music collections and there's more than a few CDs I own that I wouldn't have considered without having been introduced through friends.
The music industry needs people like me to make money - we're their biggest consumers and a pretty effective sales force. Annoy me, stop me copying my music to my computer and they'll lose out, badly. OK, we're after the _good_ stuff not just what we've been told to like, but that's a small price to pay.
No, but one would hope that any journalist picking up stories from Slashdot would notice that SCO's claims have been consistently rubbished very, very quickly here. Any journalist who wasn't is deserving of firing and quickly.
Yes, there are stupid investors who are just asking to get burnt and badly. But in this case you're assuming they're reading Slashdot, taking the headlines only, missing the point of them and not even reading the top paragraph. I very sincerely doubt any quantity of SCO stock has been bought by people as a result of reading Slashdot stories, because they're tending to emphasise how this is really just a house of cards and that that price _will_ collapse as soon as the legal wheels finally start turning.
For a site that tends to have a fairly strong campaigning ethos, what about ethical investing?
There isn't a hope of me investing in SCO, full stop. Until they start playing nice and not just shouting at people to try and scare them, they are permanently off-radar.
(I see they're 4% down. Here's hoping...)
Are you honestly suggesting that anyone who's using Slashdot as a news source could honestly consider investing in SCO to be a good idea?
Cerberus.
(Dratted post time limits! Some times a one-word answer is all that's needed and it would have been smaller in the database, too!)