Bullshit! I was out walking our fence with my Dad (we had three acres surrounded with an electric fence) and we had disconnected the fence at the charger so we could clear weeds and stuff from the wires without getting shocked. Anyways I'm standing there when I'm done, pissing on a fence post, when my bastard Dad plugs the fence back in (and he knew that I was taking a leak). The sensation was interesting, to say the least. I hopped backwards, tripped over my pants and ended up lying on my back with piss dribbling all over me. Sure, if you're just dribbling along you might not get a shock, but if you have a good flowing stream, fueled by a thermos of coffee you will feel the power!
I have the 4.4 book and somewhere I have his book on FreeBSD 3.3. When I started getting deeper into UNIX these were the first books I read. They are not just for BSD geeks, there's so much inbreeding between versions of UNIX that these are great books if you're interested in learning about Linux, or Solaris or any other UNIX variant. You might not get specific implementation details in these books but you will get a lot of great theory on OS design that is very well presented and which is applicable across the UNIX spectrum.
Sell it on eBay and label it that. Is the equipment on lease? If so let us know what the vendor thinks when it goes off lease. This is even better than opening up an AlphaServer DS20 and taking a shit inside of it before sending it back to Compaq.
and can contain his ego he'll option Timothy Zahn's series of Star Wars novels, hire someone else to direct, put his name on it as executive producer and then STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM IT!. The Timothy Zahn novels, along with Alan Dean Foster's Splinter in the Mind's Eye were the best Star Wars novels written. For those of you who haven't read them they are:
There would be problems with the fact that the actors are older than their characters are portrayed in the Zahn books, but hey, George is a wizard with CGI, let's see him do something useful with it instead of creating more characters like Jar-Jar Binks or editing the cantina scene so that Greedo shoots first.
But did anyone else think it was incredibly cool when they set up their dish and started to receive satellite programs. You have this tiny (relatively speaking) piece of metal pointing at the sky that is capable of picking up an incredibly weak signal and amplifying it so you can pick up 500 channels of crap and the three DTV channels that you actually watch. It's cool that the same technology that can pick up signals from space probes billions of miles away has dropped in price to the point that normal people can buy it.
Re:Adaptation of sci-fi novels must be tough
on
A Sound of Thunder
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· Score: 1
Which Dune are you talking about. The horrific Dino DeLaurentis version of the 1980s (with Sting as Feyd Rautha and a soundtrack by Toto) or the SciFi channel version. The 1980s version was horrible. You had Kyle Maclachlan playing an absolutely wooden Paul Atreides, the pilots of the spacer guild basically travel through space by eating the planet and then shitting it out their ass (go look at the film again if you don't believe me) and much of the sets and SFX look as if Dino DeLaurentis recycled them from Flash Gordon, another one of his colossal failures.
Of course the 1980s Dune was directed by David Lynch, so you had all of the Lynch fans out there spooging themselves over the fact that Lynch had now made another incomprehensible mess of a film, but it still sucked ass.
US $100 bills aren't that hard to counterfeit.
on
Make Money Fast
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· Score: 2, Interesting
When I lived in Germany in 1998-99 the only place you could exchange $100 bills was a bank or currency exchange, and they required that you produce positive ID in the form of a passport or German ID card before they would accept the bill. This was because the US bills were easily counterfeited and apparently several hundred million dollars worth of them had been run off by Iran and North Korea.
I wonder how hard it would be to just use OCR to track money these days. You could put scanners into each ATM that would scan bills as they were dispensed and store the serial numbers, a trivial bit of OCR. You could also have banks install scanners at each teller's station when they dispense the cash (many of Washington Mutual's new branches have teller stations that are like ATMs, you make your withdrawal and the teller never handles the cash, it is dispensed from a slot. By tracking serial numbers you could see how your currency is flowing. Additionally you could spot counterfeiting, if bill serial number 1234567890 is simultaneously used in several locations and scanned you could assume that it was counterfeited. No fancy RFID's required, just modifications to bill dispensing machines in banks and other financial institutions which could easily and quietly be mandated by the Department of the Treasury.
Putting a DVI input on the system that would allow you to use this as a standard monitor for an external computer. Now, this might sound insane, but think about it. You have a PC that you still have to use for some tasks, or a PC laptop. You plug your PC into the iMac DVI input and can switch over to the display for it, you've just made it easier for people to transition between Macs and PCs. Sure, you can use Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection for this sort of thing, but not if you're doing anything graphics intensive on the PC. Given the pricing Apple is putting on these systems you could sell the system with the 20 inch monitor as a 20 inch 16:9 monitor for PCs that also runs Macintosh software. OK, I'll go take my medication now.
Perhaps this will lead to computers that are built like modern tube amps. You'll have windows in the front of the box, but not
so you can see your neon light case mod, but so you can see the warm glow off of the CPU, RAM and chipsets.
Rather than worry about this they should have a big tourist event around it. Figure out what the safe distance is to view this, fence off two big concentric rings around that, and then sell tickets to watch the show. They could even have different bands playing at different quadrants of the circle before the big blow-off. They could get AC/DC in one quadrant and Judas Priest in another. It would be awesome, and they could make money doing a live PPV event.
How hard would it be...
on
Star Wars on DVD
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· Score: 4, Interesting
To get LaserDiscs of the original movies before George started fucking around with them and remaster them onto DVDs and then distribute them underground? I have no desire to see the new and improved _Star Wars_ and it just shows how unoriginal Lucas is, he can't come up with anything new so he just reedits _Star Wars_ and re-releases it every time he needs a few more bux (just like the way Francis Ford Coppola) keeps re-editing _Apocalypse Now_ and adding new footage.
I'd be willing to bet that with decent equipment you could make a pretty good transfer from a LaserDisc and while it might not have the resolution or sound of the new versions it would retain all of the stuff that made the original movies so great.
it will just be one more thing for script kiddies to 0wn on them.
"The Arglebargle virus takes control of the case lighting control software and locks the system into cycling between the colors 'Pepto-Bismol pink', 'institutional pea-green' and '1985 IBM PC/AT beige/grey'."
- From a future CERT advisory.
device is a modern stereo or home theatre receiver. Sure, if you're a dedicated gearhead you can buy a separate tuner, pre-amplifier and amplifier (if you're really dedicated you'll have an amplifier for each channel and if you're insanely dedicated you'll have an outboard D/A converter for your CD player and an outboard phono preamp if you have a turntable) but for the most part modern receivers are fairly well designed and do what people want them to do, switch components, process signals, make things louder and let you listen to the radio (which is unfortunately an afterthought as a lot of the tuners in modern home theatre receivers are crap). Part of this synergy is due to the fact that a receiver doesn't have a lot in the way of moving parts (with the obvious exception of switches, knobs and the like) so, with solid state components being as durable as they are there's not a lot to break down, and if something does break you're probably better off just replacing the whole unit. Once you add some moving parts to the mix (such as receivers with built in CD/DVD players) you've changed the dynamic as it's possible to have the really annoying failure mode of having the CD/DVD player go tits up while the rest of the system keeps working.
As a purist I'd rather that my Denon home theatre receiver didn't have an AM/FM tuner in it, because the tuner section is crap and because I don't listen to radio on my home theatre system, but I don't have to use the tuner, I could even put an outboard tuner in if I wanted to, so it does no harm except to my aesthetic sense.
Manufacturers of all-in-one devices would do well to ask themselves if jamming all of these devices into one box achieves any kind of synergy that makes the sum greater than the parts. Even when there are natural synergies that are inherent to the hardware, such as the ability of the X-box and PS/2 to play DVDs, you may still find that users don't find this useful, as evidenced by the number of people I know who own both an X-box and a DVD player or a PS/2 and a DVD player.
Of course it might be nice if software developers would ask the same question. Do users really need an office suite that does all of the useless crap that MS Office or Star Office does? Or would users be better served if developers looked for natural synergies in software products?
place categories in the Ansari X-Prize, say a second place that would win 5 million dollars and a third place that would win two. It seems as if there's a lot of cool stuff being developed by the impetus of the prize. I'd hate to see that stop when the prize is awarded.
Consumers benefit from competition, in this case superior browsers from groups such as Opera and Mozilla and integrated browsers such as Konquerer or Safari offer features and security that Microsoft doesn't provide.
On the other hand it's depressing that MIcrosoft is a big enough monopolist to let the status and security of what they maintain is an integral part of the operating system, namely the browser, to go almost completely to shit before they bestir themselves to even think about fixing it.
We already have CD burners, and we already have DVD burners.
Why would we need a dualdisc burner? All we should need is the media -- developed properly, succh media should work in existing CD/DVD burners as a "flippy" -- burn one side, flip it over, and then burn the other.
This is a totally brilliant point, I wish I had some mod points. I wonder how long it would be, if they started selling CD/DVD blanks, before some little shop in China started shipping a player that could read or write both sides of such a disk simultaneously or sequentially without flipping the disk. Now that would be a bitchin piece of kit!
Or you could just buy a Mercedes E320 CDI right now, which gets 37 miles per gallon, has 201 horsepower at 4200 RPM and 369 foot pounds of torque at 1800-2600 RPM. It's low tech, a mere diesel compared to a hybrid, but it's not vaporware.
A lot of brave men tried. Unfortunately they were eaten by the giant mutated jackalopes (is that one in the picture?) that are known to reside in the area.
OK, it's a Philips Pronto that runs Linux. Who cares? Just because something runs Linux doesn't make it interesting or significant, perhaps it did in the late 1990s, but it's 2004, everyone knows that Linux is cool, especially device manufacturers who can use it for free and get an operating system much better than Windows CE (Is the abbreviation for Windows CE, WinCE, is one of the worst ever in the history of computer product names or what?) and not end up having to pay the Microsoft tax.
Call me back when they've perfected the dual mode housepet/bus design. I think the big hang up is the emissions, namely building a catalytic converter that can handle hairballs.
As far as having different tax rates, you're right! Let's have a flat tax. Everyone pays the same percentage! No matter what the income is you pay the exact same percentage on it. Although, in reality, the jizz mopper should get a tax cut. Man what a horrible job.
Yeah, but he gets all of the change that fell on the floor, that could be pretty significant!
Good point. I should have RTFAMA (Read the Fucking Article More Attentively). Of course someone is probably already working on a Photoshop plugin for "correct faked image distortions", which would be handy to have along with some other plugins such as "remove ex-significant other from picture", "reduce glassy-eyed drunken stare", and my all time number one request, "remove drunk friends standing around with dicks hanging out by your mouth when you're unconscious".
If I take a high resolution TIFF image and start mucking with it I can see how it would be easy to find the manipulations (especially if you're as thumb-fingered as I am with PhotoShop). However with most digital cameras using various compression schemes to store the images how can you tell what is a result of manipulation versus what is an artifact of compression and or digitization? Certainly some gross manipulations will be obvious compared to the properties of compressed images, but I would imagine at some point you'd be hard pressed to say "this image was deliberately manipulated" instead of "this is a compression or digitization artifact".
While this might not be a problem for gross manipulations (the faked John Kerry/Jane Fonda photo being a recent example) I can imagine a class of images where subtle manipulations caused great effects and were not readily distinguishable from compression artifacts.
Slashdot Mirror
Heir to the Empire
Dark Force Rising
The Last Command
There would be problems with the fact that the actors are older than their characters are portrayed in the Zahn books, but hey, George is a wizard with CGI, let's see him do something useful with it instead of creating more characters like Jar-Jar Binks or editing the cantina scene so that Greedo shoots first.
Of course the 1980s Dune was directed by David Lynch, so you had all of the Lynch fans out there spooging themselves over the fact that Lynch had now made another incomprehensible mess of a film, but it still sucked ass.
I wonder how hard it would be to just use OCR to track money these days. You could put scanners into each ATM that would scan bills as they were dispensed and store the serial numbers, a trivial bit of OCR. You could also have banks install scanners at each teller's station when they dispense the cash (many of Washington Mutual's new branches have teller stations that are like ATMs, you make your withdrawal and the teller never handles the cash, it is dispensed from a slot. By tracking serial numbers you could see how your currency is flowing. Additionally you could spot counterfeiting, if bill serial number 1234567890 is simultaneously used in several locations and scanned you could assume that it was counterfeited. No fancy RFID's required, just modifications to bill dispensing machines in banks and other financial institutions which could easily and quietly be mandated by the Department of the Treasury.
I'd be willing to bet that with decent equipment you could make a pretty good transfer from a LaserDisc and while it might not have the resolution or sound of the new versions it would retain all of the stuff that made the original movies so great.
"The Arglebargle virus takes control of the case lighting control software and locks the system into cycling between the colors 'Pepto-Bismol pink', 'institutional pea-green' and '1985 IBM PC/AT beige/grey'." - From a future CERT advisory.
As a purist I'd rather that my Denon home theatre receiver didn't have an AM/FM tuner in it, because the tuner section is crap and because I don't listen to radio on my home theatre system, but I don't have to use the tuner, I could even put an outboard tuner in if I wanted to, so it does no harm except to my aesthetic sense.
Manufacturers of all-in-one devices would do well to ask themselves if jamming all of these devices into one box achieves any kind of synergy that makes the sum greater than the parts. Even when there are natural synergies that are inherent to the hardware, such as the ability of the X-box and PS/2 to play DVDs, you may still find that users don't find this useful, as evidenced by the number of people I know who own both an X-box and a DVD player or a PS/2 and a DVD player.
Of course it might be nice if software developers would ask the same question. Do users really need an office suite that does all of the useless crap that MS Office or Star Office does? Or would users be better served if developers looked for natural synergies in software products?
On the other hand it's depressing that MIcrosoft is a big enough monopolist to let the status and security of what they maintain is an integral part of the operating system, namely the browser, to go almost completely to shit before they bestir themselves to even think about fixing it.
Why would we need a dualdisc burner? All we should need is the media -- developed properly, succh media should work in existing CD/DVD burners as a "flippy" -- burn one side, flip it over, and then burn the other.
This is a totally brilliant point, I wish I had some mod points. I wonder how long it would be, if they started selling CD/DVD blanks, before some little shop in China started shipping a player that could read or write both sides of such a disk simultaneously or sequentially without flipping the disk. Now that would be a bitchin piece of kit!
As far as having different tax rates, you're right! Let's have a flat tax. Everyone pays the same percentage! No matter what the income is you pay the exact same percentage on it. Although, in reality, the jizz mopper should get a tax cut. Man what a horrible job.
Yeah, but he gets all of the change that fell on the floor, that could be pretty significant!
While this might not be a problem for gross manipulations (the faked John Kerry/Jane Fonda photo being a recent example) I can imagine a class of images where subtle manipulations caused great effects and were not readily distinguishable from compression artifacts.